How to search directory for specific files?

How to search a a directory tree in TCL for files that end in .so or .a and build a list of those directories

• I'm trying to write a set of TCL scripts that helps setup a user's environment for a set of libraries that are not in their standard LD_LIBRARY_PATH as part of a support solution. Since the system is rather sparse in terms of what I can install, I don't really have access to any TCL extensions and am trying to do this in base TCL as much as possible. I'm also relatively new to TCL as a language. What I'd like to do is search through a directory structure and locate the directories that have .so and .a files in them, build a list of those, and, eventually add them to the user's $LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. If I were doing this in a shell, I'd just use find with something like this: find /dir -type f \( -name "*.so" -o -name "*.a" \) | awk -F/ 'sub(FS $NF,x)' | sort -u I could hard-code the paths, but we want a single set of scripts that can manage several different applications. Any ideas would be very much appreciated.

• Answer:

  http://core.tcl.tk/tcllib/home has a http://core.tcl.tk/tcllib/doc/trunk/embedded/www/tcllib/files/modules/fileutil/fileutil.html module that does a recursive find: package require fileutil set filenames [::fileutil::findByPattern /dir -glob {*.so *.a}] foreach filename $filenames { if {[file isfile $filename]} { set dirs([file dirname $filename]) 1 } } puts [array names dirs] If you want to use this, but can't install something, you can just take the procedures and add them to your code (with the appropriate attribution) -- http://core.tcl.tk/tcllib/dir?ci=63d99a74f4600441&name=modules/fileutil Otherwise, just call the system's find command and parse the output (assume that your filenames do not contain newlines). set filenames [split [exec find /dir -type f ( -name *.so -o -name *.a )] \n] And the loop to extract the unique directories is similar. As a side benefit, the find invocation is actually easier to read because you don't have to escape all the chars that are special to the shell.