I'm looking for a specific directory file count that returns a number. I would type it into the terminal and it can give me the specified directory's file count.
I've already tried echo find "'directory' | wc -l" but that didn't work, any ideas?
You seem to have the right idea. I'd use -type f to find only files:
$ find some_directory -type f | wc -l
If you only want files directly under this directory and not to search recursively through subdirectories, you could add the -maxdepth flag:
$ find some_directory -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l
Open the terminal and switch to the location of the directory.
Type in:
find . -type f | wc -l
This searches inside the current directory (that's what the . stands for) for all files, and counts them.
The fastest way to obtain the number of files within a directory is by obtaining the value of that directory's kMDItemFSNodeCount metadata attribute.
mdls -name kMDItemFSNodeCount directory_name -raw|xargs
The above command has a major advantage over find . -type f | wc -l in that it returns the count almost instantly, even for directories which contain millions of files.
Please note that the command obtains the number of files, not just regular files.
I don't understand why folks are using 'find' because for me it's a lot easier to just pipe in 'ls' like so:
ls *.png | wc -l
to find the number of png images in the current directory.
I'm using tree, this is the way :
tree ph
Related
I want to see, if a symlink points to a directories in a specific dir - recursively.
Of course, I clould use
find / -type l -ls 2>/dev/null |grep /targetpath
But I do not want type all the (recurse) paths.
So I put all symlinks on my system into a file once.
find / -type l -ls 2>/dev/null >~/symlinks.txt
Then I list the directories recursively.
find /targetpath to start/ -maxdepth 2 -type d
And that is my question:
Can I pipe these paths from the last command to grep?
Grep should look into my file symlinks.txt and show the linecontent of matching lines (could be more symlinks pointing to this DIR)
I tried something like
find /targetpath to stat/ -maxdepth 2 -type d | xargs -0 -ifoo grep foo symlinks.txt
But it does not do, what I expect.
Or maybe an other, better solution?
From man find:
-lname pattern
File is a symbolic link whose contents match shell pattern pattern. [...]
Try:
find / -lname '*/targetpath/*'
See find-all-symlinks-to-a-directory-and-change-target-to-another-directory.
I would like to go through all the files in the current directory (or sub-directories) and echoes me back the name of files only if they contain certain words.
More detail:
find -type f -name "*hello *" will give me all file names that have "hello" in their names. But instead of that, I want to search through the files and if that file's content contains "hello" then prints out the name of the file.
Is there a way to approach this?
You can use GNU find and GNU grep as
find /path -type f -exec grep -Hi 'hello' {} +
This is efficient in a way that it doesn't invoke as many grep instances to as many files returned from find. This works in an underlying assumption that find returns a set of files for grep to search on. If you are unsure if the files may not be available, as a fool-proof way, you can use xargs with -r flag, in which case the commands following xargs are executed only if the piped commands return any results
find /path -type f | xargs -r0 grep -Hi 'hello'
I'm trying to count the total lines in the files within a directory. To do this I am trying to use a combination of find and wc. However, when I run find . -exec wc -l {}\;, I recieve the error find: missing argument to -exec. I can't see any apparent issues, any ideas?
You simply need a space between {} and \;
find . -exec wc -l {} \;
Note that if there are any sub-directories from the current location, wc will generate an error message for each of them that looks something like that:
wc: ./subdir: Is a directory
To avoid that problem, you may want to tell find to restrict the search to files :
find . -type f -exec wc -l {} \;
Another note: good idea using the -exec option . Too many times people pipe commands together thinking to get the same result, for instance here it would be :
find . -type f | xargs wc -l
The problem with piping commands in such a manner is that it breaks if any files has spaces in it. For instance here if a file name was "a b" , wc would receive "a" and then "b" separately and you would obviously get 2 error messages: a: no such file and b: no such file.
Unless you know for a fact that your file names never have any spaces in them (or non-printable characters), if you do need to pipe commands together, you need to tell all the tools you are piping together to use the NULL character (\0) as a separator instead of a space. So the previous command would become:
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l
With version 4.0 or later of bash, you don't need your find command at all:
shopt -s globstar
wc -l **/*
There's no simple way to skip directories, which as pointed out by Gui Rava you might want to do, unless you can differentiate files and directories by name alone. For example, maybe directories never have . in their name, while all the files have at least one extension:
wc -l **/*.*
I have recently run into a problem.
I used a utility to move all my music files into directories based on tags. This left a LOT of almost empty folders. The folders, in general, contain a thumbs.db file or some sort of image for album art. The mp3s have the correct album art in their new directories, so the old ones are okay to delete.
Basically, I need to find any directories within D:/Music/ that:
-Do not have any subdirectories
-Do not contain any mp3 files
And then delete them.
I figured this would be easier to do in a shell script or bash script or whatever else linux/unix world than in Windows 8.1 (HAHA).
Any suggestions? I'm not very experienced writing scripts like this.
This should get you started
find /music -mindepth 1 -type d |
while read dt
do
find "$dt" -mindepth 1 -type d | read && continue
find "$dt" -iname '*.mp3' -type f | read && continue
echo DELETE $dt
done
Here's the short story...
find . -name '*.mp3' -o -type d -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > non-empty-dirs.tmp
find . -type d -print | sort | uniq > all-dirs.tmp
comm -23 all-dirs.tmp non-empty-dirs.tmp > dirs-to-be-deleted.tmp
less dirs-to-be-deleted.tmp
cat dirs-to-be-deleted.tmp | xargs rm -rf
Note that you might have to run all the commands a few times (depending on your repository's directory depth) before you're done deleting all recursive empty directories...
And the long story goes...
You can approach this problem from two basic perspective: either you find all directories, then iterate over each of them, check if it contain any mp3 file or any subdirectory, if not, mark that directory for deletion. It will works, but on large very large repositories, you might expect a significant run time.
Another approach, which is in my sense much more interesting, is to build a list of directories NOT to be deleted, and subtract that list from the list of all directories. Let's work the second strategy, one step at a time...
First of all, to find the path of all directories that contains mp3 files, you can simply do:
find . -name '*.mp3' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq
This means "find any file ending with .mp3, then print the path to it's parent directory".
Now, I could certainly name at least ten different approaches to find directories that contains at least one subdirectory, but keeping the same strategy as above, we can easily get...
find . -type d -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq
What this means is: "Find any directory, then print the path to it's parent."
Both of these queries can be combined in a single invocation, producing a single list containing the paths of all directories NOT to be deleted.. Let's redirect that list to a temporary file.
find . -name '*.mp3' -o -type d -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > non-empty-dirs.tmp
Let's similarly produce a file containing the paths of all directories, no matter if they are empty or not.
find . -type d -print | sort | uniq > all-dirs.tmp
So there, we have, on one side, the complete list of all directories, and on the other, the list of directories not to be deleted. What now? There are tons of strategies, but here's a very simple one:
comm -23 all-dirs.tmp non-empty-dirs.tmp > dirs-to-be-deleted.tmp
Once you have that, well, review it, and if you are satisfied, then pipe it through xargs to rm to actually delete the directories.
cat dirs-to-be-deleted.tmp | xargs rm -rf
I'd like to construct a Linux command to list all files (with their full paths) within a specific directory (and subdirectories) ordered by access time.
ls can order by access time, but doesn't give the full path. find gives the full path, but the only control you have over the access time is to specify a range with -atime N (accessed at least 24*N hours ago), which isn't what I want.
Is there a way to order by access time and get the full path at once? I could just write a script, but it seems there should be a way to do this with the standard Linux programs.
find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \; 2> /dev/null | sort -t' ' -k +6,6 -k +7,7
This will find all files, and sort them by date and then time. You can then use awk or cut to extract the dates and files name from the ls -l output
you could try:
ls -l $(find /foo/bar -type f )
you can add other options (e.g. -t for sorting) to ls command to achieve your goal.
also you could add your searching criteria to find cmd
find . -type f | xargs ls -ldt should do the trick as long as there's not so many files that you hit the command like argument limit and spawn 2 instances of ls.
pwd | xargs -I % find % -type f
find . -type f -exec ls -l --full-time {} \; 2> /dev/null | sort -t' ' -k +6,6 -k +7,7
Alex's answer did not work for me since I had files older than one year and the sorting got messed up. The above adds the --full-time parameter which nuetralizes the date/time values and makes them sortable regardless of how old they are.