echo names and number of lines for each file in a directory

Question

I am supposed to write a shell script to which I send a command line argument, which represents a directory. Then I am supposed to echo all the filenames and number of lines for each file from that directory. I am also supposed to only do this for the top 10 files not older than 10 minutes.

find "$1" -cmin -10 -type f | head -10 

This is what I tried for finding the files newer than 10 minutes, but I have gotten some errors. And also I am not sure how to get the names. Thanks in advance for all the help.

My file names are free. The error I get is that the permission is denied, when passing my home directory as the argument. So I don't get the list of names. I am supposed to both get the list of filenames and the number of lines of each of those files.

When I type /bin/bash ss1 /home/ivana into the terminal, I get the following error:

find: '/home/ivana/.cache/dconf': Permission denied

I am using Linux.

Answer 1

OK, first things first. The error you get is irrelevant, it just means that a specific subdirectory (/home/ivana/.cache/dconf) of your $HOME is not owned by you. This almost certainly happened because you ran a graphical application with sudo. The simple fix is:

sudo chown -R ivana /home/ivana/

That will change the ownership of all files and directories in your $HOME back to your own username. If you can have things there that are correctly owned by another user, then just change the ownership of the dconf directory:

sudo chown -R ivana /home/ivana/.cache/dconf

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Now, that said, the way to do this correctly and deal with arbitrary file names is:

find "$1" -cmin -10 -type f -print0 | head -z -n 10 

That will cause find to print each file found with a trailing \0 instead of a newline, which ensures it will work with files whose names contain newline characters. The -z option of head makes it read \0-delimited input.

The next step is to read each of the files and print the number of lines they have:

find "$1" -cmin -10 -type f -print0 | head -z -n 10 |
    while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do wc -l "$file"; done

The IFS= sets the input field separator to empty, the -r makes read not treat \ specially (so \t doesn't become a tab) and the -d '' tells read to read \0-delimited data.