Find a file where name starts with a capital letter

Question

I'm trying to find all files for which there name starts with a capital letter. I have tried using the following command:

find . -type f -regex '.*\/[A-Z][^/]*'

It's finding paths with only lowercase letters. The following works:

find . -type f -regex '.*\/[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ][^/]*'

As does:

find . -type f | grep '.*\/[A-Z][^/]*$'

I've tried all the different options for regextype, with the same result.

Why does find include lowercase letters in [A-Z]? I thought the regex for that was [a-zA-Z]. Is there any way to specify a range of only uppercase letters in find?

Why are you escaping the slash (\/)? Also what find are you using (find --version)? — Cristian Ciupitu, Oct 25 '14 at 16:16
The version is GNU 4.4.2. Escaping the slash is just an old habit from perl or somewhere, I guess. — Karl Bielefeldt, Oct 25 '14 at 16:21
The Unicode standard has something interesting about locale-dependent ranges: "Locale-dependent character ranges will include locale-dependent graphemes, as discussed above. This broadens the set of graphemes — in traditional Spanish, for example, b-d would match against ch. Languages may also vary whether they consider lowercase below uppercase or the reverse. This can have some surprising results: [a-Z] may not match anything if Z < a in that locale!". By the way, what does the locale command say? — Cristian Ciupitu, Oct 25 '14 at 17:07
Escaping / is only necessary when you're using it as a delimiter, e.g. in s/foo\/bar/foobar/. (But often you can use some other delimiter: s#foo/bar#foobar#.) — deltab, Oct 26 '14 at 04:32

score 42 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 18 '19 at 14:46

42

You don't need to use -regex. You can use -name instead.

find . -type f -name "[[:upper:]]*"

edited Sep 18 '19 at 14:46

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answered Oct 25 '14 at 15:41

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14,916

If I wanted to use -regex instead of -name, what’s the correct syntax for it? – Lucas Feb 10 '21 at 15:58

Find a file where name starts with a capital letter

1 Answers1