reuse command output multiple times in bash script

Question

I have a bash script that operates several similar find commands and reads the output into variables:

f_list=`find /foo -name bar | sort`
f_number=`find /foo -name bar | wc -l`
f_first=`find /foo -name bar | sort | head -n 1`

All this works as expected.

Assuming the "find" command to be expensive (time wise), is there a clever way of re-using one of the results for the others?

What I tried (and failed with) is:

f_list=`find /foo -name bar | sort`
f_number=`echo "$f_list" | wc -l`
f_first=`echo "$f_list" | head -n 1`

This doesn't work, but I hope it shows what I want to achieve.

It seems that putting the results into a variable spoils some format of the original output, which breaks stuff when sent again to the other commands.

Is there some clever way of achieving what I want?

EDIT

I created a fully working example you could recreate. In my working dir I have a folder "foo" with 3 files "bar1", "bar2", "bar3".

find_result=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bar*" | sort`
find_count1=`echo "$find_result" | wc -l`
echo "$find_result"
echo $find_count1
find_count2=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bar*" | wc -l`
find ./foo -type f -iname "bar*"
echo $find_count2

results in the expected

./foo/bar1
./foo/bar2
./foo/bar3
3
./foo/bar3
./foo/bar2
./foo/bar1
3

but when the result is empty (I modified the search criteria to find nothing)

find_result=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bor*" | sort`
find_count1=`echo "$find_result" | wc -l`
echo "$find_result"
echo $find_count1
find_count2=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bor*" | wc -l`
find ./foo -type f -iname "bor*"
echo $find_count2

the two results differ (notice the empty result line in front of the "1")

 
1
0

And thus I thought the culprint to be the extra line break in the echo command. Therefore I removed that (notice the "-n" in the second line):

find_result=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bor*" | sort`
find_count1=`echo -n "$find_result" | wc -l`
echo "$find_result"
echo $find_count1
find_count2=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bor*" | wc -l`
find ./foo -type f -iname "bor*"
echo $find_count2

which solves the problem for empty results

 
0
0

but now when there are results, the "wc -l" counts the wrong way so

find_result=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bar*" | sort`
find_count1=`echo -n "$find_result" | wc -l`
echo "$find_result"
echo $find_count1
find_count2=`find ./foo -type f -iname "bar*" | wc -l`
find ./foo -type f -iname "bar*"
echo $find_count2

yields in

./foo/bar1
./foo/bar2
./foo/bar3
2
./foo/bar3
./foo/bar2
./foo/bar1
3

So the problem is one line break that I thought must have an easy resolution to avoid being different between empty and non-empty find results. I have the feeling of missing something very simple.

Answer 1

Use an array to store the null delimited list returned by find -print0 | sort -z:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# map null delimited output of command-group into the f_list array
mapfile -t f_list < <(find /foo -name bar -print0 | sort --zero-terminated)

# Number of entries in the f_list array
f_number=${#f_list[@]}

# First entry of the f_list array
f_first=${f_list[0]}

Answer 2

An alternative would be to use a temporary file. That would be something like:

temp=$(mktemp /tmp/prefixXXXXXXXXXXX)
find /foo -name bar | sort > $temp
f_number=`wc -l $temp`
f_first=`head -n 1 $temp`

rm -f $temp

Answer 3

Using a variable to reuse find's output should work. Maybe there are backslashes in your filenames that get interpreted by echo (although that should not happen by default). If so, then use printf %s "$f_list" instead. But without a complete verifiable example we cannot know for sure.

However, in this specific case you can also switch to the following command which is also safe if no file matches and safe in the very unusual case where some files have multi-line filenames.

shopt -s globstar dotglob nullglob
list=(/foo/**/bar)
number=${#list[@]}
first=${list[0]}