Data Structure
Networking
RDBMS
Operating System
Java
MS Excel
iOS
HTML
CSS
Android
Python
C Programming
C++
C#
MongoDB
MySQL
Javascript
PHP
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Mathematics
English
Economics
Psychology
Social Studies
Fashion Studies
Legal Studies
- Selected Reading
- UPSC IAS Exams Notes
- Developer's Best Practices
- Questions and Answers
- Effective Resume Writing
- HR Interview Questions
- Computer Glossary
- Who is Who
How to find all the distinct file extensions in a folder hierarchy (Linux)?
While there are plenty of ways to find the extension of a particular file in Linux using different utility commands, if we need to find all the distinct file extensions in a folder hierarchy we need to first understand the uses of the find and the sed command as these commands will be used to print all the distinct file extensions in a folder or a folder hierarchy.
The two Linux utility commands that we must be aware of are −
find − used to locate a particular file or directory
sed − short for stream editor and is used to perform functions like searching, editing and replacing.
When we are talking about a single folder then we don’t even need the find command as we can simply do that by iterating over all the files and then making use of the sort command as well.
Let’s say that I have a directory called dir1, and I want to know the file extensions in this folder that are distinct.
For that I will type the command shown below inside that directory.
Command
for file in *.*; do printf "%s
" "${file##*.}"; done | sort -u
Output
immukul@192 dir1 % for file in *.*; do printf "%s
" "${file##*.}"; done | sort -u app c dmg doc docx epub go h htm jnlp jpeg jpg json mp4 o odt pdf png srt torrent txt webm xlsx zip
As you can notice, all the extensions listed out in the above examples are distinct. Now, if we want to list all the distinct file extensions in a file hierarchy then we need to add a recursion to the above command.
Command
find . -type f | sed -e 's/.*\.//' | sed -e 's/.*\///' | sort -u
Output
immukul@192 dir1 % find . -type f | sed -e 's/.*\.//' | sed -e 's/.*\///' | sort -u app c dmg bz2 callgrind case-hosts cc cfg cgi comments conf config contention cov cpu crash crt css csv dat debug_rnglists demangle-expected dep description
916 Views
