How to find all file extensions recursively from a directory?
BashTerminalGrepBash Problem Overview
What command, or collection of commands, can I use to return all file extensions in a directory (including sub-directories)?
Right now, I'm using different combinations of ls and grep, but I can't find any scalable solution.
Bash Solutions
Solution 1 - Bash
How about this:
find . -type f -name '*.*' | sed 's|.*\.||' | sort -u
Solution 2 - Bash
list all extensions and their counts of current and all sub-directories
ls -1R | sed 's/[^\.]*//' | sed 's/.*\.//' | sort | uniq -c
Solution 3 - Bash
find . -type f | sed 's|.*\.||' | sort -u
Also works on mac.
Solution 4 - Bash
if you are using Bash 4+
shopt -s globstar
for file in **/*.*
do
echo "${file##*.}
done
Ruby(1.9+)
ruby -e 'Dir["**/*.*"].each{|x|puts x.split(".")[-1]}' | sort -u
Solution 5 - Bash
Yet another solution using find (that should even sort file extensions with embedded newlines correctly):
# [^.]: exclude dotfiles
find . -type f -name "[^.]*.*" -exec bash -c '
printf "%s\000" "${@##*.}"
' argv0 '{}' + |
sort -uz |
tr '\0' '\n'
Solution 6 - Bash
Boooom another:
find * | awk -F . {'print $2'} | sort -u
Solution 7 - Bash
ls -1 | sed 's/.*\.//' | sort -u
Update: You are correct Matthew. Based on your comment, here is an updated version:
ls -R1 | egrep -C 0 "[^\.]+\.[^\./:]+$" | sed 's/.*\.//' | sort -u
Solution 8 - Bash
I was just quickly trying this as I was searching Google for a good answer. I am more Regex inclined than Bash, but this also works for subdirectories. I don't think includes files without extensions either:
ls -R | egrep '(\.\w+)$' -o | sort | uniq -c | sort -r
Solution 9 - Bash
Another one, similar to others but only uses two programs (find and awk)
find ./ -type f -name "*\.*" -printf "%f\n" | awk -F . '!seen[$NF]++ {print $NF}'
-type f restricts it to just files, not directories
-name "*\.*" ensures the filename has a . in it.
-printf "%f\n" prints just the filename, not the path to the filename.
-F . makes awk utilize a period as the field separator.
$NF is the last field, separated by periods.
!seen[$NF]++ evaluates to true the first time an extension is encountered, and false every other time it is encountered.
print $NF prints the extension.