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I am new to linux. I have a directory in linux with approx 250,000 files I need to find count of number of files matching a pattern.
I tried using following command :
ls -1 20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_2010_* | wc -l I got the following error message:
-bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long 0 Please help. Thanks in advance
325
Browse to the folder containing the files you want to count. Highlight one of the files in that folder and press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + A to highlight all files and folders in that folder. In the Explorer status bar, you'll see how many files and folders are highlighted, as shown in the picture below.
Using grep -c alone will count the number of lines that contain the matching word instead of the number of total matches. The -o option is what tells grep to output each match in a unique line and then wc -l tells wc to count the number of lines. This is how the total number of matching words is deduced.
The grep command searches through the file, looking for matches to the pattern specified. To use it type grep , then the pattern we're searching for and finally the name of the file (or files) we're searching in.
It might be better to use find for this:
find . -name "pattern_*" -printf '.' | wc -m In your specific case:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name "20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_2010_*" -printf '.' | wc -m find will return a list of files matching the criteria. -maxdepth 1 will make the search to be done just in the path, no subdirectories (thanks Petesh!). -printf '.' will print a dot for every match, so that names with new lines won't make wc -m break.
Then wc -m will indicate the number of characters which will match the number of files.
Performance comparation of two possible options:
Let's create 10 000 files with this pattern:
$ for i in {1..10000}; do touch 20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_201_$i; done And then compare the time it takes to get the result with ls -1 ... or find ...:
$ time find . -maxdepth 1 -name "20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_201_*" | wc -m 10000 real 0m0.034s user 0m0.017s sys 0m0.021s $ time ls -1 | grep 20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_201 | wc -m 10000 real 0m0.254s user 0m0.245s sys 0m0.020s find is x5 times faster! But if we use ls -1f (thanks Petesh again!), then ls is even faster than find:
$ time ls -1f | grep 20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_201 | wc -m 10000 real 0m0.023s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.012s If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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