I’ve never needed to do that kind of search so I’ve recommended to read find command man page and use regular expressions. At home, I’ve found an nice way to do this task:

modlost@optimus:~/tmp$ mkdir -p testdir/1/2/3
modlost@optimus:~/tmp$ touch testdir/1/withoutdots
modlost@optimus:~/tmp$ touch testdir/1/2/with.dot
modlost@optimus:~/tmp$ touch testdir/1/2/3/withoutdots
modlost@optimus:~/tmp$ find testdir -type f -regex '[^.]*'
testdir/1/2/3/withoutdots
testdir/1/withoutdots

I told them about an application I made using only Bash Shell Scripting. Why did I use shell scripting? well, because that application had to take a big amount of data (more than 4GB) from two differents databases (oracle & mysql) and do a complex bussiness logic. The solution I provided was filtering the input data with some simple rules (using awk & sed) and discarded unuseful data (aprox 40%). After that, the application used some temporary tables (to do the complex logic) on mysql and got the expected result. It was unncessary to make a compiled program.

BTW, we can do some interesting things with Shell Scripting. For example, a good practice is to give users a feedback that a script is not hung (progress indicator). This is specially useful with long time jobs.

I will show two kinds of progress indicators:

Simple Progress Indicator

Print a sequence of dots.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Copyright © Abner Ballardo Urco
# http://www.modlost.net
#

#
# Simple Progress Indicator
#
function simple_progress_ind {
  # Sleep at least 1 second otherwise this algoritm will consume
  # a lot system resources.
  interval=1

  while true
  do
    echo -ne "."
    sleep $interval
  done
}

#
# Stop distraction
#
function stop_progress_ind {
  exec 2>/dev/null
  kill $1
  echo -en "\n"
}

echo "Simple Progress Indicator"
echo -n "Processing "

simple_progress_ind &
pid=$!

# Thanks Stephen Concannon for sending this fix.
# If the main script is interrupted, this line takes care
# of stopping the progress indicator
trap "stop_progress_ind $pid; exit" INT TERM EXIT

/long/time/job/zzZZzz.sh

stop_progress_ind $pid

Cool Progress Indicator

Print a rotating line.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Copyright © Abner Ballardo Urco
# http://www.modlost.net
#

#
# Cool Progress Indicator
#
function cool_progress_ind {
  chars=( "-" "\\" "|" "/" )
  interval=1
  count=0

  while true
  do
    pos=$(($count % 4))

    echo -en "\b${chars[$pos]}"

    count=$(($count + 1))
    sleep $interval
  done
}

#
# Stop progress indicator
#
function stop_progress_ind {
  exec 2>/dev/null
  kill $1
  echo -en "\n"
}

echo "Cool Progress Indicator"
echo -n "Processing "

cool_progress_ind &
pid=$!

# Thanks Stephen Concannon for sending this fix.
# If the main script is interrupted, this line takes care
# of stopping the progress indicator
trap "stop_progress_ind $pid; exit" INT TERM EXIT

/long/time/job/zzZZZzz.sh

stop_progress_ind $pid