[lug] find command or similar

[John E. Koontz]

At 10:20 AM 5/13/2003 -0600, Stephen wrote:
>Will someone please explain how I can find all files on a system with a 
>name containing more than 200 characters?

The strategy to use here is the classic Unix divide and conquer (read, 
"divide and paste together with pipes").

To list all file names in a tree, something like

find . -printf '%f\n'

I had to look up -printf '%f\n' because I usually fall back on the default, 
which lists full pathnames.

I don't know enough about find to make it select filenames based on 
filename lengths, if it can do that, and I don't know a command that does 
that directly, if there is one, but you can always fall back on awk (or 
perl, or whatever).

With awk, you pipe the output of the foregoing through

awk "length()>200 {print}"

I'd test this with shorter lengths to make sure it's doing exactly what you 
want.

I'll leave modifying the awk predicate length()>200 (short for 
"length($0)>200") to select ranges of lengths as an exercise to the reader 
...

I used the find and awk (or gawk) man pages to refresh my mind on the 
details.



John E. Koontz
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