terminal unix command find problem with setting up modes

Question

I have trouble constructing a single find line to do the following: find all files in the current dir and sub-dir with name ending with ~. or star and end with '#'.I think I have made a fundamental mistake but not so sure after 2 hours of thinking.

This is what I came up with and it does not seem to work: find -name '[#]' -a -name '[~#]'

macOSX terminal

Answer 1

You could use a combination of ls and grep to find all the files ending with either ~ or #

ls * | grep -E "*.(\~|#)"

ls -R * will show all files in the current dir and sub-dir;

grep -E will search for lines matching a regular expression;

"*.(\~|#)" will match all lines ending with either ~ or # (note that you'll need to escape the ~ with \ since it's a special character).