13

I have a directory with over 1000 files, and a few of them are .zip files, and I want to turn them all into .tgz files.

I want to use grep to make a list of file names. I have tried "grep *.zip" to no avail. Reading the man pages, I thought that * was a universal selector. Why is this not working?

Thank you.

David Faux
  • 787

2 Answers2

23

You should really use find instead.

find <dir> -iname \*.zip

Example: to search for all .zip files in current directory and all sub-directories try this:

find . -iname \*.zip

This will list all files ending with .zip regardless of case. If you only want the ones with lower-case change -iname to -name

The command grep searches for strings in files, not for files. You can use it with find to list all your .zip files like this

find . |grep -e "\.zip$"
Zoke
  • 9,476
  • Added some info on how to use find with grep if you're interested. – Zoke Jan 19 '12 at 17:51
  • 2
    Given that .zip files might be coming from one of "those other platforms," it's conceivable that they'd potentially contain spaces. Assuming the conversion process is bundled into a script like, say, zip2tgz, it might be slightly more convenient to either use find -iname '*.zip' -print0 | xargs -0 zip2tgz or find -iname '*.zip' -exec zip2tgz '{}' \; – dannysauer Nov 06 '15 at 15:31
2

Grep uses regular expressions by default. The expression you'd want is:

grep .zip$

You probably want to use find though.

find . -name '*.zip'

Or you can pipe find into grep

find . | grep .zip$
xnm
  • 121