Find files whose name is 4 characters long

shell find ls filenames wildcards

78,338

Solution 1

Use the ? wildcard for file globbing:

ls -d /tmp/????

This will print all files and directories whose filename is 4-char long.

As suggested by @roaima, the -d flag will prevent ls to display the content of subdirectories that match the pattern.

Solution 2

List files in /tmp only:

cd /tmp
find . ! -name . -prune -path './????' -type f

List files in /tmp recursively:

find /tmp -path '*/????' -type f

Solution 3

Try:

find /tmp -type f -print| awk -F/ ' length($NF)  == 4 '

What awk does:

Using / as field separator,
Finding filename $NF (last field)
Computing length
And check if value is 4, then print it.

Solution 4

There's also a perl (5.10 or newer) solution:

perl -E 'say for </tmp/????>;'

A slightly more flexible version where you can specify the desired length:

perl -E 'my $w = "?" x shift; say for </tmp/$w>;' 4

Solution 5

This seems to me like the most straightforward way to find a file of four bytes:

find /tmp -type f -size 4c

Edit: to find a file name of four bytes:

find /tmp -type f -name '????'

View more solutions

78,338

Mike

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Mike almost 2 years
I would like to find files whose name has only 4 characters.

Example, there are three files under /tmp:
```
$ ls /tmp
txt
file
linux
```
Output should only show file because it only has 4 characters.
frostschutz about 9 years

+1 for not using find
Mike about 9 years

Thanks It works! I have another question how to find the file in sub-directory without /tmp
dr_ about 9 years

Please open a separate question for this.
cuonglm about 9 years

This won't work if filename contains newline.
cuonglm about 9 years

This won't work if filename contains newline
Amine Maalfi about 9 years

@cuonglm if your going to be pedantic about newlines, at least apply it evenly across all answers to a question. Any globbing with ?(s) is susceptible to this defect.
cuonglm about 9 years

I mention this in all answers which won't handle newline in filename. Globbing doesn't have this trouble.
Amine Maalfi about 9 years

but the answer by dr01 also fails on this as \n is counted as two characters where as it is actually only one.
jw013 about 9 years

@joeLovick In *nix platforms a newline is a single linefeed character.
cuonglm about 9 years

@joeLovick: You created file with literal \n, not newline
cuonglm about 9 years

Note that this won't list hidden file.
roaima about 9 years

Use ls -d to avoid expansion of any directory matching /tmp/????
roaima about 9 years

This will also match /tmp/somelongpathname/fred, which doesn't match the glob /tmp/????
Ulric Eriksson about 9 years

It is supposed to. /tmp/???? only finds files immediately under /tmp.
frostschutz about 9 years

never parse ls for anything
don_crissti about 9 years

ls -q | grep -E '^.{4}$' should take care of those file names with funky chars (though they'll appear as question marks in the output).
cuonglm about 9 years

@Ooker: Yes, try touch a$'\n'b
Toby Speight about 9 years

Can use -maxdepth arg to restrict to immediate entries of /tmp. The original question is unclear on the requirement.
Toby Speight about 9 years

To include filenames beginning with a dot, set the dotglob shell option before this (e.g. shopt -s dotglob; to unset it afterwards, use shopt -u dotglob).
user913 about 9 years

@frostschutz. Why is using [find] sub-optimal? +10 votes suggests there's a good reason
frostschutz about 9 years

@user913 if simple globbing does the same job, find is overkill. nothing wrong with it otherwise