Highlight multiple PDFs in one folder

Question

I need to find every folder with more than one PDF in a folder structure but hide the pesky hidden files such as .HResource files that infiltrate our file system.

I only want to filter folders that have HiRes in the filename.

Ideally I want to run this at top level so it searches every folder with HiRes and spits out the folders with more than one PDF inside it.

The OS is RHEL 7 and this command can be run as user/root as required.

I have had a play with

find -type f -iname '*.pdf' -iname '*HiRes*' ! -iname '.*' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -d

but have had very little luck so far as the hidden files keep showing and thus in a 11,000 folder system giving thousands of false positives. For example, given the following directory structure,

.
|--Apples.HiRes1
|     |--Gala.pdf
|     |--Granny Smith.pdf
|     |--McIntosh.pdf
|     |--Red Delicious.pdf
|--Banana-HiRes2
|     |--upper.pdf
|     |--subdir
|     |    |--lower.pdf
|--Cherry_HiRes3
|     |--Bing.pdf
|     |--Blossom.jpg
|     |--.pesky
|     |--.hidden
|     |--.files
|     |--.HResource
|--Dates (HiRes4)
|     |--Midsummer.Pdf
|     |--New Year’s Eve.PDF
|--Employees
|     |--Fred.pdf
|     |--Ginger.pdf
|     |--New Hires
|     |     |--Sam Malone.pdf
|     |     |--Woody Boyd.pdf
|--Gemstones
|     |--Rubies
|     |     |--1.pdf
|     |     |--2.pdf
|     |--Sapphires
|     |     |--3.pdf
|     |     |--4.pdf
|--Tomato.HiRes
|     |--Bacon
|     |--Lettuce
|     |     |--5.pdf
|     |     |--6.pdf
|--Zucchini.LoRes
|     |--Bread.pdf
|     |--Squash.pdf

the output should be

./Apples.HiRes1
./Dates (HiRes4)

Note that

• Cherry_HiRes3 is excluded because it has only one PDF file in it.
• Banana-HiRes2 and Tomato.HiRes are excluded because they have two PDF files under them, but not in them.
• Zucchini.LoRes is excluded (obviously) because its name has LoRes rather than HiRes.

Answer 1

A solution that’s close to what you tried is

find . -ipath '*HiRes*/*.pdf' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -d

As you seem to (at least partially) understand, the -name and -iname tests operate on only one filename; i.e., only one level of a pathname.  So, when you say -iname '*.pdf' -iname '*HiRes*', that’s equivalent to -iname '*HiRes*.pdf'; i.e., you’re looking for files whose names match both *.pdf and *HiRes*.  However, the -path, -ipath, -regex and -iregex tests operate on the entire path, so this lists files whose pathname contains HiRes and ends with .pdf.  We put a / between them to make sure that the HiRes is in a directory names, so we don’t find files called abcHiRes123.pdf.

We can do the exact same thing with

find . -iregex '.*HiRes.*/.*\.pdf' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq –d

Note the difference between glob syntax (as used by -ipath) and regex syntax.  Dot (.) means any character, so we need to use .* to match “anything” and \. to match a literal ..

Both of the above will find the Tomato.HiRes directory in the example in your question, because  . matches /, so .*/.* matches /Lettuce/5, so .*HiRes.*/.*\.pdf matches  ./Tomato.HiRes/Lettuce/5.pdf .  If that’s OK with you, great.  But, if you want to count only the PDF files that are in a *HiRes directory, use

find . -iregex '.*HiRes[^/]*/[^/]*\.pdf' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -d

in which we use [^/] to match any character other than a /.

---

A substantially different approach, which may be easier to understand, is

find . -iname '*HiRes*' -type d -exec sh -c \
                    'shopt -s nocaseglob; for dir do files=("$dir"/*.pdf);
                    if [ "${#files[@]}" -gt 1 ]; then echo "$dir"; fi; done' sh {} +

This only uses find to find directories called *HiRes*.  It then turns those directory names over to a short shell script, which uses glob to enumerate all the PDF files in each directory and count them.

Answer 2

EDIT: This actually doesn't work either. See the comments below.

---

Have you tried adding -not -iname '.*' to your find command? The ! is probably not doing what you think it is.

This would result in find -type f -iname '*.pdf' -iname 'HiRes' -not -iname '.*' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -d

Answer 3

Okay, so I took another stab at this after realizing my previous answer was wrong. JandP, you are so close to having the right command.

---

The Setup

• 10 directories, 1-10, referred to as $s hereout
• $n files in each, where $n is the number of the directory, named $s-$n.pdf
• $n dotfiles in each, .fake-$s-$n.pdf

Command I used to create this tree of files: for s in `seq 1 10`; do mkdir $s; cd $s; for n in `seq 1 $s`; do touch $s-$n.pdf; touch .fake-$s-$n.pdf; done; cd ..; done

Produced this tree:

.
├── 1
│   ├── 1-1.pdf
│   └── .fake-1-1.pdf
├── 10
│   ├── 10-10.pdf
│   ├── 10-1.pdf
│   ├── 10-2.pdf
│   ├── 10-3.pdf
│   ├── 10-4.pdf
│   ├── 10-5.pdf
│   ├── 10-6.pdf
│   ├── 10-7.pdf
│   ├── 10-8.pdf
│   ├── 10-9.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-10.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-3.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-4.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-5.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-6.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-7.pdf
│   ├── .fake-10-8.pdf
│   └── .fake-10-9.pdf
├── 2
│   ├── 2-1.pdf
│   ├── 2-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-2-1.pdf
│   └── .fake-2-2.pdf
├── 3
│   ├── 3-1.pdf
│   ├── 3-2.pdf
│   ├── 3-3.pdf
│   ├── .fake-3-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-3-2.pdf
│   └── .fake-3-3.pdf
├── 4
│   ├── 4-1.pdf
│   ├── 4-2.pdf
│   ├── 4-3.pdf
│   ├── 4-4.pdf
│   ├── .fake-4-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-4-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-4-3.pdf
│   └── .fake-4-4.pdf
├── 5
│   ├── 5-1.pdf
│   ├── 5-2.pdf
│   ├── 5-3.pdf
│   ├── 5-4.pdf
│   ├── 5-5.pdf
│   ├── .fake-5-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-5-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-5-3.pdf
│   ├── .fake-5-4.pdf
│   └── .fake-5-5.pdf
├── 6
│   ├── 6-1.pdf
│   ├── 6-2.pdf
│   ├── 6-3.pdf
│   ├── 6-4.pdf
│   ├── 6-5.pdf
│   ├── 6-6.pdf
│   ├── .fake-6-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-6-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-6-3.pdf
│   ├── .fake-6-4.pdf
│   ├── .fake-6-5.pdf
│   └── .fake-6-6.pdf
├── 7
│   ├── 7-1.pdf
│   ├── 7-2.pdf
│   ├── 7-3.pdf
│   ├── 7-4.pdf
│   ├── 7-5.pdf
│   ├── 7-6.pdf
│   ├── 7-7.pdf
│   ├── .fake-7-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-7-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-7-3.pdf
│   ├── .fake-7-4.pdf
│   ├── .fake-7-5.pdf
│   ├── .fake-7-6.pdf
│   └── .fake-7-7.pdf
├── 8
│   ├── 8-1.pdf
│   ├── 8-2.pdf
│   ├── 8-3.pdf
│   ├── 8-4.pdf
│   ├── 8-5.pdf
│   ├── 8-6.pdf
│   ├── 8-7.pdf
│   ├── 8-8.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-1.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-2.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-3.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-4.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-5.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-6.pdf
│   ├── .fake-8-7.pdf
│   └── .fake-8-8.pdf
└── 9
    ├── 9-1.pdf
    ├── 9-2.pdf
    ├── 9-3.pdf
    ├── 9-4.pdf
    ├── 9-5.pdf
    ├── 9-6.pdf
    ├── 9-7.pdf
    ├── 9-8.pdf
    ├── 9-9.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-1.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-2.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-3.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-4.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-5.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-6.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-7.pdf
    ├── .fake-9-8.pdf
    └── .fake-9-9.pdf

10 directories, 110 files

---

The Lookup

Using JandP's basic find command, and the knowledge revealed in the comments from my other (incorrect) answer, produced an output showing the number of matching files in each directory, excluding any dotfiles:

$ find -type f -iname '*.pdf' ! -iname '.*' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c
      1 ./1
     10 ./10
      2 ./2
      3 ./3
      4 ./4
      5 ./5
      6 ./6
      7 ./7
      8 ./8
      9 ./9

Throwing a simple awk comparison on the end, produced the expected result:

$ find -type f -iname '*.pdf' ! -iname '.*' -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 1'
     10 ./10
      2 ./2
      3 ./3
      4 ./4
      5 ./5
      6 ./6
      7 ./7
      8 ./8
      9 ./9

---

The Conclusion

JandP was oh so close. This answer took a little bit of Google-fu, but came together pretty easily from there. My recommendation is to study this scenario and answer, and apply it to your situation at hand. Then, pick it apart. Understand what each command does, why the arguments are stated the way they are, and what their produced output is. Learn why piping them together has the behavior it does. This will take you far in your career in systems administration.