1

To start with, I know this way is quite not the right one, as often mentioned why shouldn't I parse the output of ls, but it is a part of my university project (so I could use sed and awk along).

I have to find files which names start with a given string. I stared with listing the current directory using ls:

ls -LR1

which gives me the example output:

.:
bin
etc
games
include
lib
man
sbin
share
src

./bin:
apt
gnome-help
highlight
mint-sha256sum
pastebin
search
szukaj
yelp

./etc:

./games:

./include:

./lib:
python2.7
python3.5

./lib/python2.7:
dist-packages
site-packages

./lib/python2.7/dist-packages:

./lib/python2.7/site-packages:

./lib/python3.5:
dist-packages

./lib/python3.5/dist-packages:

./man:

./sbin:

./share:
ca-certificates
emacs
fonts
man
sgml
xml

./share/ca-certificates:

./share/emacs:
site-lisp

./share/emacs/site-lisp:

./share/fonts:

./share/man:

./share/sgml:
declaration
dtd
entities
misc
stylesheet

./share/sgml/declaration:

./share/sgml/dtd:

./share/sgml/entities:

./share/sgml/misc:

./share/sgml/stylesheet:

./share/xml:
declaration
entities
misc
schema

./share/xml/declaration:

./share/xml/entities:

./share/xml/misc:

./share/xml/schema:

./src:

Now I want to use sed or possibly awk to get to get files with names starting with given string, lets say 'Do'. I would like to achieve something like this:

  1. sed (or awk?) parses each line and searches for line that starts with 'Do'
  2. If there is a match, moves to previous line and searches for . (which is an indicator for relative path), if there's no match jumps to the line before and so on
  3. Prints the line as relative path:.path/filename

Is it even possible to achive? Thank you for your help!

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3
  • 1
    find . -name 'Do*' Commented Oct 14, 2016 at 20:03
  • Thank you for your answer. I am aware of find existence, however as stated in OP, I am required to use sed and/or awk. Commented Oct 14, 2016 at 20:09
  • 3
    Show your teacher "The Evolution of a Programmer." Then tell your teacher to come up with some better example use cases for text processing; there are literally thousands of cases where sed or awk are the correct tools for the job. Finding files isn't one of them. Commented Oct 14, 2016 at 20:14

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

As an example, let's consider these files:

$ ls -LR1
.:
a

./a:
b

./a/b:
bad
Do_good

Now, let's find the file that you want:

$ ls -LR1 | awk '/^\.\//{sub(/:$/, "/", $0); dir=$0} /^Do/{print dir $0}'
./a/b/Do_good

How it works:

  • /^\.\//{sub(/:$/, "/", $0); dir=$0}

    Every time that we find a line that begins with ./, we replace the find : with a / and update the variable dir

  • /^Do/{print dir $0}

    Every time that we find a line that begins Do, we print the variable dir followed by this line.

Limitation: As you are aware, the output of ls is intended to be human-readable and parsing it is unreliable. This code is only for purposes of demonstrating the use of awk. It should not be used for anything serious.

Preferred method -- 1

As wildcard pointed out, find is the right tool for this task:

$ find . -name 'Do*'
./a/b/Do_good

Preferred method -- 2 (requires bash)

In bash, as Kusalananda points out, one can recursively search for files using the globstar feature:

shopt -s globstar nullglob
printf '%s\n' **/Do*
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2
  • Or printf '%s\n' **/Do* in shells that supports **. Commented May 28, 2019 at 10:02
  • @Kusalananda Yes, very good. Thank you. A globstar solution has been added to the answer. Commented May 29, 2019 at 6:04
3

With sed, you'd use the hold space to store the path of the last seen directory:

sed -n '
  /^\..*:$/{
    h;d
  }
  /^Do/{
    G
    s|\(.*\)\n\(.*\):|\2/\1|p
  }'
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1
  • Thank you for the solution which uses sed! Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 12:30

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