List all unique extensions for files contained in a directory

Question

I would like to see all the unique extension of files contained in a certain directory. What is the command to do that in bash?

One could use find . -type f to get all the files in the current directory, then strip the extension, and pipe it to uniq. What's the easiest way to strip the extension?

Answer 1

Try this:

find . -type f | sed -rn 's|.*/[^/]+\.([^/.]+)$|\1|p' | sort -u

It outputs nothing for:

• Files with no extension
• Files with names that end in a dot
• Hidden files

It also might be useful to pipe it to sort | uniq -c.

Answer 2

A quick and easy to remember way to strip the extension is to asume all filenames have the format "name.ext" then use:

 ls -1 | cut -d"." -f2- | sort | uniq -c

this gives a count of how many unique extensions there are, for example:

   1 sh  
   3 txt  
   4 txt.Z  
  17 dat  
  72 dat.gz  

Answer 3

find . -type f | sed -E 's/.+[\./]([^/\.]+)/\1/' | sort -u

Works on OS X, except for files without extension. My downloads folder:

DS_Store
dmg
exe
localized
msi
nib
plist
pmproj
rar
tgz
txt
webloc
zip

You might need sed -r instead?

---

Minor issue: Files without extensions print their name. Hidden files (such as .DS_Store) print their name without leading ..

Answer 4

Here's yet another solution that does not get confused by file names containing embedded newlines and uses sort -uz to correctly sort file extensions that may have embedded newlines as well:

# [^.]: exclude dotfiles
find . -type f -name "[^.]*.*" -exec bash -c '
   printf "%s\000" "${@##*.}" # get the extensions and nul-terminate each of them
' argv0 '{}' + |
sort -uz | 
tr '\0' '\n' | 
nl

Answer 5

see, that's why I like awk:

find . -type f | awk -F "." '{ print $(NF) }' | sort -u