I'm both a regex & SE Unix and Linux newbie, so I hope I'm doing everything right.
I'm looking for files that have a name inside of the filename, and could have different extensions. I based my initial trials on this answer (the linux part) and my basic understanding of find and regexes, but with limited success.
I tried this regex: .*filename[^/].*\.(jpg|xcf|png|jpeg), which inside find looked like this find . -iregex '.*filename.*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\)$'.
The idea was to exclude the appearance of "filename" inside directory names, hence the "without forward slashes" [^/] part of the regex, but it excludes the most basic (and necessary) format, e.g. filename.jpg
I also tried find . -type f -iregex '.*filename.*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\)$', but I have the feeling that using regexes might bypass the -type flag, because I still get all the directories in my results.
Could you share some light?
[^/]but then don't seem to use it; I suspect what you want is[^/]*(not[^/].*) – steeldriver Jun 18 '19 at 18:00[^/]would prevent the regex to find patterns that had a slash in it, but then how does the simple quantifier alone allow for other characters to be there? Or the quantifier in this case means "find any char but a /" (which would then be equivalent to the., but for the exception)? – Giampaolo Ferradini Jun 18 '19 at 19:59[^/]*is a (possibly empty) sequence of characters none of which is/whereas[^/].*means a single character that is not/followed by a (possibly empty) sequence of any characters (which may include/) – steeldriver Jun 18 '19 at 22:02[^/]actually means "every kind of character but /". – Giampaolo Ferradini Jun 19 '19 at 00:20