Home / server / Questions / 398649
In Process
Anirudh
Asked: 2012-06-15 01:15:57 +0800 CST

find count of images within a directory

  • 772

I wanted to find the number of image files within a directory. I ended up using this :

find . -type f  -exec file {} \; | grep -c -i 'image'

This feels like an inefficient way of doing it. I could think of another way to do it - using an OR statement, but I couldn't figure out from the man page how this could be done.

Any ideas how this could be done more efficiently? I don't want to execute the commands above on a directory with a rather large number of files and have it take forever.

linux bash find

3 Answers

  1. If you want to search for images by extension, you can use the following command:

    find -type f -name *.gif -o -name *.jpg -o -name *.bmp

    Of course, you need to list all extensions you are interested in.

    To get the count, you can append | wc -l.

    • 6

  2. You can get an efficiency improvement by using \+ instead of \;. The difference here is that \+ passes all found files to a single execution of file where \; executes file once for every file that was found.

    find . -type f  -exec file {} \+ | grep -c -i 'image'

    You will run into problems if it finds more files than file can take as arguments. You could pipe it through xargs with the --max-args option if that is the case.

    • 5

  3. if you want to find files by mime-type of file in this case "image", you will need following command 

       find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -i | grep -i image | wc -l
    • 1