Most of the issues with filenames with metacharacters have been answered.
However, the question
> How do you search for files, with meta characters as their names?
still remains. You can do this with good ol' trusty find command. There's
a trick however. Let's look at the find command syntax:
find starting_directory -name name_mask -print
where startting_directory is the root of the directory tree where
the search will begin.
name_mask is the filename or filename mask to be
used for matches during the search.
So to find a file name "myfile" searching the entire filesystem you would
type the command
find / -name myfile -print
If you want to find files that end in ".txt" for example you would need to
enter the command line:
find / -name '*.txt' -print
Note that at this point we are enclosing the filename *.txt in single
quotes.
This is to prevent the shell from expanding the "*" into a list of filenames
before the command gets called. If you happen to have a file named "*.txt"
and another one named "star.txt", both will be listed. This shows us
that this command is not quite enough to find only those files with
metacharacters. To do this we need to double-escape the metacharacters we
want to search for. For example, to find a file named "*.txt" without
listing
the file "star.txt" we would issue the command:
find / -name '\*.txt' -print
In a simmilar veign, to find all files with a metacharacter in their name
we would issue the command:
find . -name '*\**' -print
The dot "." is a very special character which is used to separate filename
segments and cannot be associated with a "*". Thus to find all files with
metacharacters in their names we need to issue two commands:
find . -name '*\**' -print
find . -name '.*\**' -print
Hope this helps understand the find command and metacharacters a little
better.
Samantha Jo Moore
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.thetahoegroup.com
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
