Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

...in which I don't go up mountains

Category: Unix Shell

Radiohead: No surprises

Unix file counting challenge, Part 3: Counting with Shell Scripts

Reading Time: 7 minutes

This post follows on from Unix file counting challenge, Part 2, which in itself follows on from Part 1. No surprises there.

Post Summary

These are the steps I’ve been taking in developing a short Unix shell script to count a lot of files and directories by type.

Scarlett O'Hara: "After all, Tomorrow is another day!", Gone With the Wind, via MagicalQuote.com

Unix file counting challenge, Part 2: Tracking down the errors

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Summary:

I’ve got a project coming up that will involve some major tidying up of a big shared network drive that has been used in different ways by many different people over many years.

One of the first steps is to find out what kind of files are on the network drive, how many of them there are, whether they’re still being used, and where they are stored in the directory structure.

I use a Windows laptop at work, which has a VPN connection to the University’s network and a MacBook at home, which doesn’t (yet). I’ve also been attending a training course in Unix skills, which seem like they could usefully be applied to this problem, and I’ve been really enjoying finding out more about this.

So that’s the combination of things going on.

This post is continued from Part 1, which is:

Can I turn a massive bureaucratic, er, challenge into a fun Unix challenge?

Counts with text fragments

Can I turn a massive bureaucratic, er, challenge into a fun Unix challenge?

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Well.

I have been given an enormous number of files of different types, in many jumbled up directories and subdirectories on a network drive, to count. That ought to be a job for the Unix commands and shell scripting I’ve been learning at Software Carpentry over the last couple of weeks, right?

My initial thoughts were that this could be done with either the command line, probably involving ls, sort, regular expressions with uniq and counting options or a shell script looping through a file listing with some combination of those.

Time to fire up Git Bash, my trusty Unix terminal for Windows…

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel