Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Second Edition

Enumerating file type statistics

There are many file types. It will be an interesting exercise to write a script that can enumerate through all the files inside a directory, its descendants, print a report that provides details on types of files (files with different file types), and the count of each file type present. This recipe is an exercise on how to write scripts that can enumerate through many files and collect details.

Getting ready

The file command can be used to find out the type of the file by looking at the contents of the file. In Unix/Linux systems, file types are not determined based on the extension of the file (like the Microsoft Windows platform does). This recipe aims at collecting file type statistics of a number of files. For ...