Using find to locate files that match one of multiple patterns

Use -o, which means "or":

find Documents \( -name "*.py" -o -name "*.html" \)

You'd need to build that command line programmatically, which isn't that easy.

Are you using bash (or Cygwin on Windows)? If you are, you should be able to do this:

ls **/*.py **/*.html

which might be easier to build programmatically.

Some editions of find, mostly on linux systems, possibly on others aswell support -regex and -regextype options, which finds files with names matching the regex.

for example

find . -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*\.(py|html)$" 

should do the trick in the above example. However this is not a standard POSIX find function and is implementation dependent.

You could programmatically add more -name clauses, separated by -or:

find Documents \( -name "*.py" -or -name "*.html" \)

Or, go for a simple loop instead:

for F in Documents/*.{py,html}; do ...something with each '$F'... ; done

This will find all .c or .cpp files on linux

$ find . -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp"

You don't need the escaped parenthesis unless you are doing some additional mods. Here from the man page they are saying if the pattern matches, print it. Perhaps they are trying to control printing. In this case the -print acts as a conditional and becomes an "AND'd" conditional. It will prevent any .c files from being printed.

$ find .  -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp"  -print

But if you do like the original answer you can control the printing. This will find all .c files as well.

$ find . \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp" \) -print

One last example for all c/c++ source files

$ find . \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cpp"  -o -name "*.h" -o -name "*.hpp" \) -print

I had a similar need. This worked for me:

find ../../ \( -iname 'tmp' -o -iname 'vendor' \) -prune -o \( -iname '*.*rb' -o -iname '*.rjs' \) -print