bash escaping and find command

Question

I trying to remove boring \-escaping from this command:

find . \( -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg' \) -print

by wrapping it in single quotes:

find . '( -name *.mp3 -o -name *.jpg )' -print

implying that arguments go straight to the find without any expansions.

However the output is different.

Answer 1

find . -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg' -print

Answer 2

find . '( -name *.mp3 -o -name *.jpg )' -print

This looks for all files in the directories named . and ( -name *.mp3 -o -name *.jpg ), which is probably not what you intended.

Use the single quotes just for the round brackets:

find . '(' -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg' ')' -print

Answer 3

You could also use regular expressions, which in my opinion make this more concise and gives you better control:

find . -regextype posix-egrep -iregex '.*(pdf|mp3)$'

This finds all files (or directories, unless you specify -type f) that end in pdf or mp3.