I have a huge folder with a lot of subfolders where I would like to search for a folder that contains three words. Note that the folder name needs to have all three words, but the order of the words does not matter.
Example: I want to find folders containing the words APE, Banana and Tree.
find folder -name '*APE*Banana*Tree*'
However, this command will consider the order of the words, while this is not of interest and I want to find any folder with those words in any order.
Just use 3 -names:
find folder -name '*APE*' -name '*Banana*' -name '*Tree*' -type d
Beware that like any time you use wildcards in the -name pattern that it may miss files whose name contains sequence of characters not forming valid characters in the user's locale.
With zsh:
set -o extendedglob # best in ~/.zshrc
print -rC1 -- **/(*Banana*~^*APE*~^*Tree*)(ND/)
The / glob qualifier being the equivalent of find's -type d to select files of type directory.
With ksh93:
FIGNORE='@(.|..)'
set -o globstar
set -- ~(N)**/@(*Banana*&*APE*&*Tree*)/
(($# == 0)) || printf '%s\n' "$@"
ksh93 has no glob qualifiers, but appending a / to the globs restricts the expansion to files that are directories or symlinks to directories.
With bash:
shopt -s globstar dotglob nullglob extglob
set -- **/!(!(*Banana*)|!(*APE*)|!(*Tree*))/
(($# == 0)) || printf '%s\n' "$@"
Same note as for ksh93 above about the trailing /.
Where:
D, FIGNORE, dotglob makes sure hidden files are also reported (like find does)N, ~(N), nullglob makes the glob expand to nothing instead of causing an error or expand to itself when there's no matchglobstar makes ksh93/bash understand zsh's **/ recursive globbing operator.(x~^Y), @(X&Y), !(!(X)|!(Y)) being three approaches in the respective shells to match files that match both patterns.