15

I am trying to find files that have a newline in the filename. But I can't figure out what pattern to use.

The following works, but is not very useful if I want to use it in indented code.

find . -name '*
*'

I tried these two and they only succeeded in finding filenames that contained the letter n:

find . -name '*\n*'
find . -name "*\n*"

Then I found how to write backslash escape sequences and tried this:

find . -name "*$'\n'*"

But that doesn't find anything. How should I write the pattern?

toxalot
  • 1,025

1 Answers1

19

In shell scripting, everything is a string. You do need to quote the * to prevent filename expansion, but you don't want to put the backslash escape sequence inside double quotes.

You could just concatenate the strings by placing them right after each other.

find . -name '*'$'\n''*'

But for better readability, you can use ANSI-C Quoting for the whole string.

find . -name $'*\n*'
toxalot
  • 1,025