List all files in a directory with a certain extension

Question

Let's say I want to list all php files in a directory including sub-directories, I can run this in bash:

ls -l $(find. -name *.php -type f)

The problem with this is that if there are no php files at all, the command that gets executed is ls -l, listing all files and directories, instead of none.

This is a problem, because I'm trying to get the combined size of all php files using

ls -l $(find . -name *.php -type f) | awk '{s+=$5} END {print s}'

which ends up returning the size of all entries in the event that there are no files matching the *.php pattern.

How can I guard against this event?

Answer 1

I suggest you to firstly search the files and then perform the ls -l (or whatever else). For example like this:

find . -name "*php" -type f -exec ls -l {} \;

and then you can pipe the awk expression to make the addition.

Answer 2

If you want to avoid parsing ls to get the total size, you could say:

find . -type f -name "*.php" -printf "%s\n" | paste -sd+ | bc

Answer 3

Here is another way, using du:

find . -name "*.php" -type f -print0 | du -c --files0-from=- | awk 'END{print $1}'