How to use find command to find all files with extensions from list?

Question

I need to find all image files from directory (gif, png, jpg, jpeg).

find /path/to/ -name \"*.jpg\" > log

How to modify this string to f

Answer 1

in case files have no extension we can look for file mime type

find . -type f -exec file -i {} + | awk -F': +' '{ if ($2 ~ /audio|video|matroska|mpeg/) print $1 }'

where (audio|video|matroska|mpeg) are mime types regex

&if you want to delete them:

find . -type f -exec file -i {} + | awk -F': +' '{ if ($2 ~ /audio|video|matroska|mpeg/) print $1 }' | while read f ; do
  rm "$f"
done

or delete everything else but those extensions:

find . -type f -exec file -i {} + | awk -F': +' '{ if ($2 !~ /audio|video|matroska|mpeg/) print $1 }' | while read f ; do
  rm "$f"
done

notice the !~ instead of ~

Answer 2

find /path/to/  \( -iname '*.gif' -o -iname '*.jpg' \) -print0

will work. There might be a more elegant way.

Answer 3

find /path/to/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep -i image

This uses the file command to try to recognize the type of file, regardless of filename (or extension).

If /path/to or a filename contains the string image, then the above may return bogus hits. In that case, I'd suggest

cd /path/to
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file --mime-type | grep -i image/

Answer 4

find -E /path/to -regex ".*\.(jpg|gif|png|jpeg)" > log

The -E saves you from having to escape the parens and pipes in your regex.

Answer 5

In supplement to @Dennis Williamson 's response above, if you want the same regex to be case-insensitive to the file extensions, use -iregex :

find /path/to -iregex ".*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\)" > log

Answer 6

On Mac OS use

find -E packages  -regex ".*\.(jpg|gif|png|jpeg)"