Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Was hoping I would be able to do this with the find command but I can see no test in the manual for doing what I want. I would like to be able to find any directories in the working directory that contain less-than, more-than or exactly the count I specify.
find . -filecount +10 # any directory with more than 10 entries
find . -filecount 20 # any directory with exactly 20 entries
But alas there is no such option.
You could try this, to get the sub directory names and the number of files/directories they contain:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{} '; ls '{}' | wc -l" \;
If you want to do the same for all sub directories (recursive find) use this instead:
find . -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{} '; ls '{}' | wc -l" \;
To select those directories that have exactly 10 files:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{} '; ls '{}' | wc -l" \; |
awk '$NF==10'
10 or more:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{} '; ls '{}' | wc -l" \; |
awk '$NF>=10'
10 or less:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{} '; ls '{}' | wc -l" \; |
awk '$NF<=10'
If you want to keep only the directory name (for example of you want to pipe it to another process downstream as @evilsoup suggested) you can use this:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{}\t'; ls '{}' | wc -l" \; |
awk -F"\t" '$NF<=10{print $1}'
find . -type d -exec bash -c 'echo -ne "{} "; ls "{}" | wc -l' \; | awk '$NF<=10'
Sep 22, 2018 at 17:18
ls, wc and awk): find . -type d -exec /bin/bash -c 'd="{}"; a=( "${d%/*}"/* ); [[ ${#a[*]} == 10 ]]' ';' -print
Oct 8, 2020 at 20:46
Terdon's answer is generally well illustrative of the right approach, however here's a slightly shorter answer which only uses find and bash (doesn't need ls, wc and awk), and can also deal with files or directories containing newlines.
find . -type d -exec /bin/bash -c 'a=( "{}"/* ); [[ ${#a[*]} == 10 ]]' ';' -print
find and for each sets the a variable to an array of the contents of the directory with a=( "{}"/* ). Then the number of elements in the array, ${#a[*]} is compared against 10. If the number of elements is indeed 10 then the -exec command returns true (due to the 0 exit code from bash). Since -exec returns true, the -print argument is executed and the directory name is printed indicating that the directories listed have exactly 10 files/directories inside them.
Nov 24, 2021 at 5:56
To list immediate subdirectories containing exactly $NUM files.
find -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type f -printf '%h\0' | awk -v num="$NUM" 'BEGIN{RS="\0"} {array[$0]++} END{for (line in array) if (array[line]==num) printf "%s\n", line}'
To list immediate subdirectories containing greater than $NUM files.
find -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type f -printf '%h\0' | awk -v num="$NUM" 'BEGIN{RS="\0"} {array[$0]++} END{for (line in array) if (array[line]>num) printf "%s\n", line}'
To list immediate subdirectories containing less than $NUM files.
find -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type f -printf '%h\0' | awk -v num="$NUM" 'BEGIN{RS="\0"} {array[$0]++} END{for (line in array) if (array[line]<num) printf "%s\n", line}'
Items are terminated by a null character \0, so file names that contain newlines or other types of white space will be interpreted correctly. The %h prints each file's dirname. awk then uses an array to count how many times it encounters each directory, printing it if the conditions are met.
Please note that none of the aforementioned commands will display directories containing zero files. Also note that by file I am referring to regular files, not links, directories, sockets, blocks, named pipes, etcetera.
I've tried to do this as simply as possible. If you want to find recursive subdirectories or the files therein, a modified command is required. There are too many possibilities to list them all.
Try this:
[ `find . | wc -l` -eq 10 ] && echo "Found"
[ `find . | wc -l` -gt 10 ] && echo "Found"
[ `find . | wc -l` -lt 10 ] && echo "Found"
In this examples you can check if CURRENT directory contains exactly 10, more then 10 and less then 10 files/directories. If you need to check bunch of directories, just use loop.
.), you may want to modify accordingly.
wc -l < <(printf %s\\n ./*) or printf %s\\n ./* | wc -l inside the test, to avoid an unnecessary find call. This will also avoid the problem that @terdon noted, of including . in the result. However, it would also run into the problem of ignoring files beginning with a .; I would solve this with shopt -s dotglob (to make globs match files beginning with a ., but not . or ..).
For finding dirs with exactly 20 files with greedy grep
find -type f | grep -o '.*\/' | sort | uniq -c | grep -e '^\s+20'
If you want to get the number of all files - also those nested in subdirectories - contained in directories up to a specific depth, you can extend terdons answer with another call to find. This worked for my case:
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c "echo -ne '{} '; find '{}' -type f | wc -l" \; | awk '$NF>3'
What I like about this approach is that with the second call to find the expression becomes highly customizable (by adding -name "..." flag or -maxdepth -mindepth an so on)
