find files by number of charecters in file name

[ironchef]

Hi all
i am trying to make an apple script
that will go over a 3.5 Tera of hard disk
find pdf files with names 11 characters long
and copy the files to a selected location.
sadly the find file in automator do not contain this Boolean.
thanks for any help or ponters

[macosnoob]

You might experiment with find in Terminal. For targetfolder on the user's Desktop, I see that this command gets you part of the way to the goal:

find /Users/username/Desktop/targetfolder -name "*.pdf"

(substitute your own username and the name of the targetfolder)

Now the question is, for find, what can replace the * to specify exactly 11 wildcarded characters? (And do you really mean 11 characters, counting neither the pdf extension nor the . separator?) I can't work out the syntax, though it looks like the -regex option may be the key.

[NaOH]

I've never used it, but after reading this help request I happened to see a piece of software called LengthControl. It's free and looks like it may help with this task.

[hayne]

The regex syntax for matching on number of characters in filenames with 'find' is discussed in this older thread: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=97990

[ironchef]

thanks to you all, ill try the find in terminal.
but, is there an apple script solution ?
or is it "to deep" for applescript?

[Hal Itosis]

Quote: Originally Posted by ironchef i am trying to make an apple script that will go over a 3.5 Tera of hard disk find pdf files with names 11 characters long and copy the files to a selected location.

Does that "3.5 Tera of hard disk" include a Time Machine matrix by any chance? [i.e., any Backups.backupd database folders?] I think that -- unless provisions are made to record and skip duplicate inodes -- the copied result may contain multiple instances of each file. [i guess it also depends on the form of the copy command... perhaps redundancies will just overwrite previous copies, but that's still potentially wasteful (time + bandwidth) if these are large files.]

Quote: Originally Posted by ironchef is there an apple script solution? or is it "to deep" for applescript?

It could probably be done nicely in "pure" AppleScript... but would likely be longer than this:

find -xE /path/to/source/folder -type f -iregex '.*/[^/]{11}\.pdf'

[that's just the "find" part, but the "copying" part is also pretty short (using Bash).]

Quote: Originally Posted by macosnoob And do you really mean 11 characters, counting neither the pdf extension nor the . separator?

We still don't know yet. My command assumes 11 for name [not including ".pdf"]

Hmm, "11" huh? Almost sounds like one of those "8+3 DOS" things, where we're looking for items that are 8 chars (or less) plus a 3 char extension which conform to that ancient requirement. (idunno)

[renaultssoftware]

This is a snippet that I thought of, being a natural at the language:
[code]
-- ………
set allFiles to {} -- files to copy
repeat with i in the files
set e to info for i
set d to displayed name of e
set c to kind of e
if count characters of d is 11 then
if c is "Portable Document Format (PDF)" then
copy i to the end of allFiles
end if
end if
end repeat
duplicate allFiles to PATH_TO_LOC -- replace the PATH_TO_LOC with your path; you can also add 'with replacing' for elimination of duplicates.

[renaultssoftware]

Sorry, forget the end code fn.

-- ………
set allFiles to {} -- files to copy
repeat with i in the files
   set e to info for i
   set d to displayed name of e
   set c to kind of e
   if count characters of d is 11 then
      if c is "Portable Document Format (PDF)" then
         copy i to the end of allFiles
      end if
   end if
end repeat
duplicate allFiles to PATH_TO_LOC -- replace the PATH_TO_LOC with your path; you can also add 'with replacing' for elimination of duplicates.

[ironchef]

Thanks!