bash error find: -printf: unknown primary or operator

Question

I make a list of all files in my PC.

FILES=$(find . -type f -name '*' -printf "%s/%f\n" | sort -n)

The output should be:

"size/file_name"
56872/file.txt
98566/test
1000254/foo

My PC give me error

find: -printf: unknown primary or operator

Any solutions?

Answer 1

The -printf option is not in POSIX find. It is a feature of GNU find, e.g., on Linux.

The particular implementation you are using is not shown; it might be POSIX without extensions. For instance, it is not in FreeBSD, or OSX.

Without that, you can use some alternative, e.g., this (which will not handle embedded blanks, etc., but makes few assumptions about your tools):

find . -type f -exec ls -ld {} \; | awk '{ gsub("^.*/","",$9); printf "%s/%s\n", $5, $9; }'

With more information about the available tools, it is (usually) possible to improve the solution.

Answer 2

find and xargs with GNU stat:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0r stat -c '%s/%n'

This GNU version isn't really needed for this particular question because GNU find supports printf anyway (but it might be useful in other contexts because there are things that stat can find out about a file that find ... -printf can't display).

FreeBSD & Mac OS X, however, are a different story.

find and xargs with FreeBSD (& Mac OS X) stat:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0r stat -f '%z/%N'

Optionally pipe the output through sed -e 's:/./:/:' to remove the ./ at the beginning of each filename.

Sample output, from my FreeBSD test VM:

# find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0r stat -f '%z/%N' | sed -e 's:/./:/:' | head
149/.k5login
254/.profile
1169/.cshrc
297/.login
5589/.history
171/.ssh/known_hosts
1803/.ssh/authorized_keys
6699/.bash_history
368/.bashrc
4065/.viminfo