linux find regex

Question

I'm having trouble using the regex of the find command. Probably something I don't understand about escaping on the command line.

Why are these not the same?

find -regex '.*[1234567890]'
find -regex '.*[[:digit:]]'

Bash, Ubuntu

Answer 1

You should have a look on the -regextype argument of find, see manpage:

      -regextype type
          Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex 
          tests which occur later on the command line.  Currently-implemented  
          types  are  emacs (this is the default), posix-awk, posix-basic, 
          posix-egrep and posix-extended. 

I guess the emacs type doesn't support the [[:digit:]] construct. I tried it with posix-extended and it worked as expected:

find -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*[1234567890]'
find -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*[[:digit:]]'

Answer 2

Regular expressions with character classes (e.g. [[:digit:]]) are not supported in the default regular expression syntax used by find. You need to specify a different regex type such as posix-extended in order to use them.

Take a look at GNU Find's Regular Expression documentation which shows you all the regex types and what they support.

Answer 3

Note that -regex depends on whole path.

 -regex pattern
              File name matches regular expression pattern.  
              This is a match on the whole path, not a search.

You don't actually have to use -regex for what you are doing.

find . -iname "*[0-9]"