CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosunixterminal
TLD
TLD

Reputation: 8135

Count number of specific file type of a directory and its sub dir in mac

I use ls -l *.filetype | wc -l but it can only find files in current directory.
How can I also count all files with specific extension in its sub dirs?
Thank you very much.

Upvotes: 43

Views: 31602

Answers (2)

RobC
RobC

Reputation: 25042

The following compound command, albeit somewhat verbose, guarantees an accurate count because it handles filenames that contain newlines correctly:

total=0; while read -rd ''; do ((total++)); done < <(find . -name "*.filetype" -print0) && echo "$total"

Note: Before running the aforementioned compound command:

  1. Firstly, cd to the directory that you want to count all files with specific extension in.
  2. Change the filetype part as appropriate, e.g. txt

Demo:

To further demonstrate why piping the results of find to wc -l may produce incorrect results:

  1. Run the following compound command to quickly create some test files:

    mkdir -p ~/Desktop/test/{1..2} && touch ~/Desktop/test/{1..2}/a-file.txt && touch ~/Desktop/test/{1..2}/$'b\n-file.txt'

    This produces the following directory structure on your "Desktop":

    test
├── 1
│   ├── a-file.txt
│   └── b\n-file.txt
└── 2
    ├── a-file.txt
    └── b\n-file.txt

    Note: It contains a total of four .txt files. Two of which have multi-line filenames, i.e. b\n-file.txt.

    On newer version of macOS the files named b\n-file.txt will appear as b?-file.txt in the "Finder", i.e. A question mark indicates the newline in a multi-line filename

  2. Then run the following command that pipes the results of find to wc -l:

    find ~/Desktop/test -name "*.txt" | wc -l

    It incorrectly reports/prints:

    6

  3. Then run the following suggested compound command:

    total=0; while read -rd ''; do ((total++)); done < <(find ~/Desktop/test -name "*.txt" -print0) && echo "$total"

    It correctly reports/prints:

    4

Upvotes: 2

P.P
P.P

Reputation: 121427

You can do that with find command:

find . -name "*.filetype" | wc -l

Upvotes: 94

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