Recursively find all files that match a certain pattern

I need to find (or more specifically, count) all files that match this pattern:

*/foo/*.doc

Where the first wildcard asterisk includes a variable number of subdirectories.

With gnu find you can use regex, which (unlike -name) match the entire path:

find . -regex '.*/foo/[^/]*.doc'

To just count the number of files:

find . -regex '.*/foo/[^/]*.doc' -printf '%i\n' | wc -l

(The %i format code causes find to print the inode number instead of the filename; unlike the filename, the inode number is guaranteed to not have characters like a newline, so counting is more reliable. Thanks to @tripleee for the suggestion.)

I don't know if that will work on OSX, though.

how about:

find BASE_OF_SEARCH/*/foo -name \*.doc -type f | wc -l

What this is doing:

• start at directory BASE_OF_SEARCH/
• look in all directories that have a directory foo
• look for files named like *.doc
• count the lines of the result (one per file)

The benefit of this method:

• not recursive nor iterative (no loops)
• it's easy to read, and if you include it in a script it's fairly easy to decipher (regex sometimes is not).

UPDATE: you want variable depth? ok:

find BASE_OF_SEARCH -name \*.doc -type f | grep foo | wc -l

• start at directory BASE_OF_SEARCH
• look for files named like *.doc
• only show the lines of this result that include "foo"
• count the lines of the result (one per file)

Optionally, you could filter out results that have "foo" in the filename, because this will show those too.

Based on the answers on this page on other pages I managed to put together the following, where a search is performed in the current folder and all others under it for all files that have the extension pdf, followed by a filtering for those that contain test_text on their title.

find . -name "*.pdf" | grep test_text | wc -l

Untested, but try:

find . -type d -name foo -print | while read d; do echo "$d/*.doc" ; done | wc -l

find all the "foo" directories (at varying depths) (this ignores symlinks, if that's part of the problem you can add them); use shell globbing to find all the ".doc" files, then count them.