Using find with -exec {}, is there a way to count the total?

Question

I am using a command similar to this one:

find . -name "*.php" -exec chmod 755 {} \; 

Although, I am not using chmod, I am using a different command which I will not list here. This command is working fine. However, there are thousands of files and directories to be operated on, and this operation takes some time. I am wondering if there is a way to display some sort of total when the operation is complete? Perhaps a count of modified files?

The only thing I can think of is simply to do something like:

find . -name "*.php" -exec chmod 755; echo "+"; {} \; 

Will that work? At least we can see that something is happening... Anyone have a better suggestion?

Answer 1

This works:

$ find . -name "*.php" -exec chmod 755 {} \; -exec /bin/echo {} \; | wc -l 

You have to include a second -exec /bin/echo for this to work. If the find command has no output, then wc has no input to count lines for.

Answer 2

You can chain multiple -exec commands with a single find command. The syntax for that is:

find . -exec cmd1 \; -exec cmd2 \; -exec cmd3 \; 

which in your case would look like this:

find . -name '*.php' -exec chmod 755 {} \; -exec echo '+' \; 

Although you have a few other options for this. You can redirect output to a file:

find . -name '*.php' -exec chmod 755 {} \; > logfile.txt 

Or, you can use tee, which will allow you to write the output to a logfile, and still output to the screen. I find this useful, as the continuously-streamed output to the screen lets me know that the command is still running (not crashed or hung), and I still have the log file to refer to later.

find . -name '*.php' -exec chmod 755 {} \; | tee logfile.txt wc -l logfile.txt           // prints the lines in the file grep -c '^+$' logfile.txt   // prints the lines containing a single '+'