Styjun

I'm trying to find owners of files on the system that all start with a specific name, for example

[unu@here findtest]$ find . -ls
17295583 0 drwxrwxr-x 2 unu unu 74 Mar 28 03:14 .
17295584 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 br_asd1 br_asd1 0 Mar 28 03:13 ./test1
17295585 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 br_asd2 br_asd2 0 Mar 28 03:13 ./test2
17295586 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 unu unu 0 Mar 28 03:13 ./test33
17295587 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 br_bfg1 br_bfg1 0 Mar 28 03:14 ./test11
17295588 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 unu unu 0 Mar 28 03:14 ./test22

I need find to only get files owned by users whose name starts with "br_".

So what I tried was

[unu@here findtest]$ find . -user "br_*" -ls
find: ‘br_*’ is not the name of a known user

Now a method I found that works is using awk, but I have certain problems with this method and it's not really usable for what I'm trying:

[unu@here findtest]$ find . -ls|awk 'if ($5 ~ "br_"'
17295584 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 br_asd1 br_asd1 0 Mar 28 03:13 ./test1
17295585 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 br_asd2 br_asd2 0 Mar 28 03:13 ./test2
17295587 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 br_bfg1 br_bfg1 0 Mar 28 03:14 ./test11

Is there a way to add wildcards to the -user or -group options of find?

If you're writing for bash you can use an array to hold the set of users and another array to generate the corresponding syntax for find to match those users:

#!/bin/bash

# The beginning of the userids we need to match
match=br

# Find the matching set of users
users=($(
 getent passwd |
 awk -F: -vm="$match" 'BEGIN re = "^" m $1 ~ re print $1'
))

# Build the list of users ("find ( -user XX -o -user YY -o user ZZ ) ...")
finds=()
for user in "$users[@]"
do
 finds+=('-o' '-user' "$user")
done
[[ $#finds[@] -gt 0 ]] && finds=('(' "$finds[@]:1" ')')

# Execute the find command with the set of users
find . "$finds[@]" -ls

As ever, you can prefix the find command with something like echo to see what would be executed. (Or you could run with bash -x to enable line-by-line debug reporting.)

If all you need is just a listing, I would go for a good old grep over find’s output. It would be slower, but much less typing.

At the very basic you might try this, for your example case:

find -printf '%u %pn' | egrep '^br_'

This gives you the list of files owned by users br_*, shown with username and filename on each line.

You might then expand the output by fiddling the -printf format string.

For instance, to make it resemble more an ls output:

find -printf '%-8.8u %-8.8g %M %8s %t %pn' | egrep '^br_'

The important thing to keep the command line as short as possible is to place the username at the very beginning, so that the egrep’s part can be kept short like that.

To see all that you can specify in the format string, go here, then search for -printf format.

Be careful though that if your files have newlines in their names then this solution might have problems in showing them.