2

I'm trying to do a simple find in my /var/log directory to find all syslog files that are not zipped. What I have so far is the regex:

syslog(\.[0-9]*)?$

So this would find syslog, syslog.1, syslog.999, etc and skip over the gzipped logs like syslog.1.gz or anything else not matching the pattern of the aforementioned syslogs. I'm doing a pretty basic find command, too:

find /var/log -regextype posix-extended -regex "syslog(\\.[0-9]*)?$"

However, I always get an empty result! Now, I thought the regex I wrote was POSIX-extended compatible, but it doesn't seem to be so. Here are variations of the command I ran, to no avail:

find /var/log -regextype posix-extended -regex "syslog(\\.[0-9]*)?$"

sudo find /var/log -regextype posix-extended -regex "syslog(\\.[0-9]*)?$"

find /var/log -regextype posix-extended -regex "syslog"

find /var/log -regextype posix-extended -regex "(syslog)"

This following works as expected by listing all files in the directory, however, so I know my command format is correct.

find /var/log -regextype posix-extended -regex ".*"

What am I doing wrong?

Kenny Worden
  • 4,335
  • 11
  • 35
  • 62

1 Answers1

3

The regex pattern you provide needs to match the whole path. That means that you don't need to anchor it at the beginning and end with ^ and $, it's already implicitly anchored at both ends. But you do need to provide a leading .* or something similar if the rest of your pattern should match somewhere other than the beginning (and remember, find paths always include a directory, even if it's .).

find . -regextype posix-extended -regex '.*syslog(\.[0-9]*)?'

works for me.

hobbs
  • 223,387
  • 19
  • 210
  • 288