Command finds some, misses some

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

The contents of my home directory:

bin  Desktop  Documents  Downloads  folders  Music  Pictures  Public  Templates  Videos

When I run the command

for file in /home/myself/*d*; do if [ -x "$file" ]; then echo $file; fi; done

it finds

 /home/myself/Downloads 
 /home/myself/Videos

but not "folders".

Ubuntu 18.04.2; Xfce 4.12.3; kernel 4.15.0-45-generic; bash 4.4.19(1); Dell Inspiron-518

2

man test yields:

       -x FILE
              FILE exists and execute (or search) permission is granted

Is folders a directory?
What are its permissions?

1 Like
3

permissions fixed it! thanks!

edit: it is not a folder; I was just experimenting

4

Be very careful with using this because if there are filesname with spaces, tabs or other non-printing characters, it might break again.

You might be better to use find instead:-

find . -name "*d*" -print

I'm sure that this isn't all you want to do, but spaces in filenames (or other things) can cause problems. What is the overall requirement?

Kind regards,
Robin

1 Like
5

Folders would be seen as files with execute perms, so the question is more are those "folder" true folders or files, because files dont necessarily need execution perms, but it gets more tricky when talking of subdirectories: not giving them x means you cannot traverse them...

1 Like
6

EDIT: fixed it. Putting -maxdepth before -name works!

@rbattel

When I run

find . -name "*d*" -print

several hundred files are found, as it delved into subdirectories (not my intent)

but when I try

find . -name -maxdepth 1 "*d*" -print

I get

find: paths must precede expression: `1'