find does not work with my variable

Question

I'm trying to find the number of dirs and files in a given dir. I'm running my bash script like this:

ARCHIVE=/path/to/archive ./myScript

in my script I am doing this:

#find the number of non-empty directories in the given dir 
dirs=$(find $ARCHIVE -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -not -empty -type d | wc -l)
#find the number of files in the given dir
msgs=$(find $ARCHIVE -type f | wc -l)

echo "Number of directories: $dirs"
echo "Total number of messages: $msgs"

This works great when I am running the script on a subset of the data I'm looking at, which is located in a dir at the same level as the script. However, the actual data is in someone else's directory and when I run it with the ARCHIVE variable set to that location, both values return as 0. I have a similar script that I use as well, and the find command there does not work on the second directory either. Strangely enough, I use some egrep commands and they work just fine for both.

Why can I not use find in this manner?

Answer 1

Try passing the directory you want to search as a parameter to the bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# First argument to script shall be directory in which to search
ARCHIVE=$1 

#find the number of non-empty directories in the given dir 
dirs=$(find "$ARCHIVE" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -not -empty -type d | wc -l)
#find the number of files in the given dir
msgs=$(find "$ARCHIVE" -type f | wc -l)

echo "Number of directories: $dirs"
echo "Total number of messages: $msgs"

Running the script, called dirfiles, on my home directory:

$ ./dirfiles ~
Number of directories: 27
Total number of messages: 8703

And on /usr/lib:

$ ./dirfiles /usr/lib
Number of directories: 161
Total number of messages: 9630

Furthermore, find offers three ways to resolve symbolic links:

• -P: don't follow symbolic links
• -L: follow symbolic links
• -H: don't follow symbolic links except when processing command line arguments.

If you don't want to follow symlinks, but $ARCHIVE happens to be one, then perhaps -H is the way to go.

Answer 2

This is happen because probably you don't have read permissions in someone else's directory. If you don't have read permissions, you can't view/search/find any content. You can check this with the following command:

ls -l /home/username/directory

Also be sure that those files or directories for which you search are really files or directories (first character from 10 character string permission is - or d, not something else - l in your case which stands for symbolic links).

ls shows permissions as a 10 character string, for example -rw-r--r--. The characters can be interpreted as TUUUGGGOOO where:

T Type
UUU   Rights for the owner of the file
GGG   Rights for users in the group
OOO   Rights for others, not listed above

T is one of:

- file
d directory
c character device
b block device
l symbolic link

Source: Introduction to Unix file permissions

Also, when you use:

• find -type d - you search only for directories.
• find -type f - you search only for regular files.