find, grep and tr

A practical example of three useful unix commands, and how they can work together.

I thought I had found another chance to use sed (see Right Sed Fred, I'm too sexy to search and replace), but in the end did not use it; I wanted to remove newline characters but sed works line by line so this is not possible. (There is a way to do this with sed apparently, but it looked awfully hard to understand.) So I used tr instead.

Here is my final command:
find /path/to/myfiles/ -mtime -125 -name '*txt' -print | grep -v xxx | tr '\012' ' '

The first part:
find /path/to/myfiles/ -mtime -125 -name '*txt' -print

means search all the *.txt files under the given path, that have been created or modified in the past 125 days. It outputs one filename per line.

However it include some files I didn't want. Luckily they all had the same filename component ('xxx' in my example above), so were trivial to identify. I used "grep -v" which means exclude anything that matches.

At this stage I had the list of filenames, but one per line. I wanted to use them as the parameters to a batch file, so needed them all on one line. I couldn't get sed to work, but stumbled on a way to use the "tr" tool. It takes two parameters: the character to replace, and what to replace it by. '\012' is octal for the unix linefeed character. So
tr '\012' ' '

means replace LF with a space. I slapped this on to the previous command and got just want I wanted.

(For unix beginners, the | is called the pipe character, and it means take the output of the command before it and give it as the input to the command after it. Many unix commands are designed with this kind of piping behaviour in mind.)