Using find to locate files that match one of multiple patterns

Question

I was trying to get a list of all python and html files in a directory with the command find Documents -name "*.{py,html}".

Then along came the man page:

Braces within the pattern (‘{}’) are not considered to be special (that is, find . -name 'foo{1,2}' matches a file named foo{1,2}, not the files foo1 and foo2.

As this is part of a pipe-chain, I'd like to be able to specify which extensions it matches at runtime (no hardcoding). If find just can't do it, a perl one-liner (or similar) would be fine.

Edit: The answer I eventually came up with include all sorts of crap, and is a bit long as well, so I posted it as an answer to the original itch I was trying to scratch. Feel free to hack that up if you have better solutions.

Answer 1

Use -o, which means "or":

find Documents \( -name "*.py" -o -name "*.html" \) 

---

You'd need to build that command line programmatically, which isn't that easy.

Are you using bash (or Cygwin on Windows)? If you are, you should be able to do this:

ls **/*.py **/*.html 

which might be easier to build programmatically.

Answer 2

Some editions of find, mostly on linux systems, possibly on others aswell support -regex and -regextype options, which finds files with names matching the regex.

for example

find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*\.(py|html)$"  

should do the trick in the above example. However this is not a standard POSIX find function and is implementation dependent.