Look if a folder has some files with certain extensions

Question

Suppose I have a file structure:

$ cd /home/Desktop
$ ls -d */
Abc/ Qwe/ Zxc/ Rty/
$

Now I want to iterate through every directory and see if they have any ".pdf" files. Could some one please tell what is the best way to do this?

Solution 1

for dir in Abc/ Qwe/ Zxc/ Rty/; do
  result="$(find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.pdf' -printf .)"
  echo "Folder '${dir}' contains ${#result} *.pdf files."
done

This ignores subdirectories.

Solution 2

Use find /home/Desktop -type f -name '*.pdf'.

Solution 3

There are several different ways to do this, depending on what you want to do with the information.

• If you want a list of directories which directly contain .pdf files (i.e. only at the top level, not within subdirectories), I'd go with this:

  dirname */*.pdf | sort | uniq
  

• If you want a list of directories which contain .pdf files at any level (so they could be within subdirectories of the directory), try

  find . -name '*.pdf' | cut -d/ -f2 | sort | uniq
  

  or, if you want to search only certain subdirectories,

  find Abc Qwe Zxc Rty -name '*.pdf' | cut -d/ -f1 | sort | uniq
  

• If you want a list of all the .pdf files within the subdirectories, that's just

  find . -name '*.pdf'
  

• If you want a count of .pdf files within each directory, to count only files at the top level I'd use

  dirname */*.pdf | sort | uniq -c
  

  or to include files in subdirectories

  find . -name '*.pdf' | cut -d/ -f2 | sort | uniq -c
  

  (you can tell the difference is simply adding the -c option to uniq).

Solution 4

Using find is certainly the fastest way to do it. If you want to restrict the directories to look for, you can use:

find <dir1> <dir2> ... -type f -name '*.pdf'

If you want to count the number of files:

find <dir1> <dir2> ... -type f -name '*.pdf' | wc -l

Solution 5

With zsh:

for dir (Abc Qwe Zxc Rty) {
  pdf=($dir/*.pdf(ND.))
  print -r "Directory '$dir' contains ${#pdf} *.pdf files"
}

View more solutions

Comments

[gkmohit]

This works exactly I want it to :D Thanks Hauke :)

[Stéphane Chazelas]

That assumes GNU find.

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

This lists all the PDF files without indicating which toplevel directories contain any. That's like giving someone a cow when they ask for a hamburger.

[gena2x]

Incorrect. This lists all pdf files with directories for each file. So you can easily see which file belongs to which directory. Yes, it seems author wanted something more like true/false, but i see no way to figure this out from question