mjhjmtu

I have a folder with ~10K XML files. Each of them looks like this:

...
<object>
<name>Cat</name>
</object>
<object>
<name>Cow</name>
</object>
...

The name includes person, cat, dog, cow, ... I want to pick out the only xml files with cat and/or dog. How can I do this?

Following code is based on GNU grep

As you said , that all files are like this, so you can use grep

for Cat or Dog , use

grep -l '<name>(Cat|Dog)</name>' *

for Cat and Dog both to be present, use

grep -l '<name>Cat</name>' * | xargs grep -l '<name>Dog</name>'

and if you want case-insensitive search , then add -i option to grep

-l - this option will print only filename having match

With normal regex, the characters (, | and ) need to be escaped, so I have escaped them

To get all the Cat or Dog values out of the name node in an XML document like yours, you may use xmlstarlet like this:

xmlstarlet sel -t -v '//object/name[text() = "Cat" or text() = "Dog"]' file.xml

This would generate the words Cat and Dog as output if they exist the document as the values of an object node's name child-node. This operation would be tricky to get right with grep in case there are other name nodes that are not child-nodes to object nodes, or if some name nodes have attributes etc.

Unfortunately, xmlstarlet does not exit with a non-zero exit status if it can't find anything in the XML input file, so we need to tack on a grep at the end of this to check whether we got any output at all (this will be used in the next step):

xmlstarlet sel -t -v '//object/name[text() = "Cat" or text() = "Dog"]' file.xml | grep '.'

We can then run this on all the 10k files though find:

find . -type f -name '*.xml' -exec sh -c '
 xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//object/name[text() = "Cat" or text() = "Dog"]" "$1" |
 grep -q "."' sh ';' -print

This would first find all regular files in or below the current directory whose names end with .xml. For each such file, xmlstarlet is run to extract the Cat and Dog strings from the correct XML nodes, and grep is used to check whether xmlstarlet found anything. Running grep with its -q option makes the utility quiet, but it will exit with the appropriate exit status depending on whether it matched anything or not.

If grep found anything, find then prints the pathname of the file that contained the data.

If you have many files consider the use of indexer tools like Beagle, Tracker, glimpse or similar.

Example:

$ glimpseindex -H . MyDir
$ glimpse -l -H . 'cat;dog' 

to get the files containing cad and dog