How to check if filename contains any element in array in bash

Question

Say I have an array: myarray=( json txt png )

And say I have a directory containing files with all sorts of extensions: somefile.png, file2.docx, etc.

How would I go about looping through all files, and if they don't have any of the extensions in the array, remove them? I know I could loop over each file, then loop over all array elements and check them individually, but I was wondering if there was a way to compare a string to an entire array (which seems to be contrary to the majority of questions that I've found: Where you have an array and you check to see if a given string is found in the array)

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-24 19:18:35Z

1

Using bash extglob, you may do this:

shopt -s extglob nullglob
myarray=( json txt png )
patt=$( IFS='|'; echo "${myarray[*]}" )
echo rm !(*@($patt)*) **/!(*@($patt)*)

Once you're satisfied with the output, remove echo before rm.

edited Nov 24, 2020 at 19:18

answered Nov 24, 2020 at 18:45

anubhava

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2 Comments

PedsB Over a year ago

Excellent, thanks! If I wanted to loop through a series of subdirectories and use this snippet how would I go about doing this? I guess I could just cd into each subdirectory and call it, but is there a way to apply this to all files in all subdirectories?

PedsB Over a year ago

Also, I do not always want to check for extensions, that was just an example, is there a way to check if any of the array elements are anywhere in the filename? E.g.: json.docx would be removed in this case but I would want to keep it since it contains json.

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