B. M. wrote: > Short Summary: > How can I find files which parent folders have the same name? > ... > Assuming that at least some of these files are in parent folders with > the same name, do you know any tool which can help in finding them and > moving them around? The 'find' program is the standard utility to find files. GNU find includes a regex (regular expression) extension. I think it should do what you want. find . -iregex '.*\(.*\)/\1' Here is a test case I made for your example. $ find . ./aaa ./aaa/file1 ./aaa/ccc ./aaa/bbb ./aaa/bbb/bbb ./aaa/aaa ./aaa/aaa/aaa Running that find command upon it prints: find . -iregex '.*\(.*\)/\1' ./aaa/bbb/bbb ./aaa/aaa ./aaa/aaa/aaa Explanation of the command. The find command finds files. Directories in Unix are simply files. Special files but files just the same. The -iregex option takes a regular expression to match across the entire path from begining to end. The 'i' part of iregex is to ignore case. I assume you would want to search without case ensitivity. The (...) part starts a regular expression grouping. The parens must be quoted with \(...\) to turn on their magic function since this is an extended regular expression syntax (ERE) and the default is basic regular expressions (BRE). You can read all about regular expressions, the different engines, and how to use them. The '.' matches any single character. The '*' modifies that to match any number of characters. You see '.*' a lot in regular expressions. Putting it in (.*) matches any number of characters and groups it into a grouping that can be referenced again later in the expression with a backreference. The \1 is a backreference that means whatever was previously matched in the first (...) grouping. If there were a \2 that would match the second grouping and so forth. It feels a little magical but (.*)/\1 matches anything that is aaa/aaa or bbbb/bbbb where the second part is the same as the first part. The '/' in the middle matches the directory separator so that the first part and the second part must be different directories. Hope that helps, Bob
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