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bashcounting
Katherine Rix
Katherine Rix

Reputation: 672

How can I find and count number of files matching a given string?

I want to find and count all the files on my system that begin with some string, say "foo", using only one line in bash.

I'm new to bash so I'd like to avoid scripting if possible - how can I do this using only simple bash commands and maybe piping in just one line?

So far I've been using find / -name foo*. This returns the list of files, but I don't know what to add to actually count the files.

Upvotes: 8

Views: 14560

Answers (3)

Bernhard
Bernhard

Reputation: 3694

You can pipe it into wc

find / -name foo * | wc -l

Upvotes: 0

Adam Liss
Adam Liss

Reputation: 48330

You can use

find / -type f -name 'foo*' | wc -l
  • Use the single-quotes to prevent the shell from expanding the asterisk.
  • Use -type f to include only files (not links or directories).
  • wc -l means "word count, lines only." Since find will list one file per line, this returns the number of files it found.

Upvotes: 19

parapura rajkumar
parapura rajkumar

Reputation: 24433

find / -name foo* | wc -l should do it. Here is a link to man wc. wc -l counts the number of lines

Upvotes: 4

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