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I have a folder structure like so.

.
└── apps/
    ├── bo/
    │   └── platform/
    │       └── values-dev.yaml
    ├── canary/
    │   └── platform/
    │       └── values-canary-dev.yaml
    ├── foo/
    │   ├── customer
    │   ├── audit
    │   ├── platform/
    │   │   └── values-foo-dev.yaml
    │   └── platform-gb/
    │       └── values-foo-dev.yaml
    └── bar/
        ├── customer
        ├── audit
        ├── platform/
        │   └── values-bar-dev.yaml
        ├── platform-usa/
        │   └── values-bar-dev.yaml
        ├── platform-ca/
        │   └── values-bar-dev.yaml
        └── platform-ie/
            └── values-bar-dev.yaml

Sorry in advance for the wording.

I'm trying to use bash to find and replace specific string puppy which exists in each of the values-*-dev.yaml files but I only want to change it on files which exist under foo and bar as well as in each platform subdirectory and replace dog with dog

The closest I've gotten is with the following which lists only the files inside foo but for the life of me I cannot figure this out.

find . -type f -path '*foo/platform*' -name 'values-*-dev.yaml'

I thought by wrapping foo in brackets and adding bar it would work but it doesn't

find . -type f -path '*(foo|bar)/platform*' -name 'values-*-dev.yaml'
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  • find accepts a list of start points. If your directory structure is fixed, you can just start with find apps/{foo,bar}/platform ... and omit the -path option. Commented Jan 9, 2024 at 13:51

1 Answer 1

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No, find's -name and -path only support basic sh wildcard patterns, so only ? for single character * for any number of characters and [...] for single character in a range/set/class (and \ to escape those)...

Here, with standard find, you'd do

find . '(' -path '*/foo/platform*' -o -path '*/bar/platform*' ')' \
       -name 'values-*-dev.yaml' \
       -type f \
        -exec perl -pi -e 's/puppy/dog/g' {} +

Some find implementations also support a -regex predicate to match full paths using regexps. For extended regexps, on BSDs, you use the -E option like for grep/sed and with GNU find, the -regextype posix-extended "option predicate".

For all variants, regexps are implicitly anchored so you need:

# BSD
find -E . -regex '.*/(foo|bar)/platform.*' \
          -name 'values-*-dev.yaml' \
          -type f \
          -exec perl -pi -e 's/puppy/dog/g' {} +

# GNU
find . -regextype posix-extended \
       -regex '.*/(foo|bar)/platform.*' \
       -name 'values-*-dev.yaml' \
       -type f \
       -exec perl -pi -e 's/puppy/dog/g' {} +

Or you could use zsh, where that would just be:

perl -pi -e 's/puppy/dog/g' -- **/(foo|bar)/platform*/**/values-*-dev.yaml(.)

As zsh has several useful glob pattern extensions over the basic sh ones including:

  • **/ which matches any level of subdirectories
  • (a|b): alternation like in extended regexps.
  • glob qualifiers including . used here to restrict the search to regular files (equivalent of find's -type f).
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  • Thank you the only thing that seems to be failing is detecting directories which are like platform-usa etc. Commented Jan 9, 2024 at 14:43
  • @doug, my bad, I had overlooked those. See edit. Commented Jan 9, 2024 at 15:19

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