recursion in bash going infinite loop

Question

I want to search for all files with a specific name in a directory and apply ls -l on it , to inspect its size, First I went with find . -name .ycm* | ls -l but it didn't work , got the explanation from this link.

Then I tried to create a script which will recursively go through the directory and search for the file name and do ls -l on it or any other command in general.

I came with the following script , but it turned out that its stuck in the first call itself , and its calling it again and again .

#!/bin/bash
for_count=0 
file_count=0
dir_count=0
search_file_recursive() {
    # this function takes directory and file_name to be searched 
    # recursively
    # :param $1 = directory you want to search
    # :param $2 = file name to be searched

    for file in `ls -a `$1``:
    do
        let "for_count=for_count+1"
        echo "for count is  $for_count"
        # check if the file name is equal to the given file
        if test $file == $2 
        then
            ls -l $file
            let "file_count++"
            echo "file_count is $file_count"
        elif [ -d $file ] && [ $file != '.' ] && [ $file != '..' ]
        then
            echo "value of dir = $1 , search = $2, file = $file"
            search_file_recursive $file $2
            let "dir_count++"
            echo "directory_count is $dir_count"
        fi
    done
    return  0
}

search_file_recursive $1 $2

This is how my output looks without echo

 anupam  …  YouCompleteMe  third_party  ycmd   ae8a33f8 … 5  ./script.sh pwd .ycm_extra_conf.py 
Segmentation fault: 11
 anupam  …  YouCompleteMe  third_party  ycmd   ae8a33f8 … 5  echo $?
139

Backticks do not nest. Don't parse the output of ls. Quote your variable expansions. Test your script in ShellCheck. What Unix are you on? You first say you just want the size of files that matches a particular pattern, but your code seems to be doing a lot more than that. Could you clarify what you want to do please? — Kusalananda, Nov 07 '18 at 10:29
@Kusalananda , I am on Mac 10.14 , I added extra variables just for debugging , I just want to go into every directory recursively and search if it has a matching file name in it .. its same as find but just I have to run ls -l on that file — lazarus, Nov 07 '18 at 10:39
About the endless loop: \ls -a `$1``` seems to evaluate to the list given by \ls -a .`` concatenated to $1. It spells like "execute ls -a (that defaults to .) and concatenate $1 to the result". — fra-san, Nov 07 '18 at 11:04

Kusalananda · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-07T10:47:28.527

With GNU find, to get the sizes (in bytes) of the regular files whose filenames match the pattern .ycm*, you would do

find . -type f -name '.ycm*' -printf '%s\t%p\n'

This would print the size followed by a tab and the pathname of the file. Note the quoting of the filename pattern to avoid using it as a shell globbing pattern on the command line.

The following would use the external stat command (on Linux only) on each file in a similar way:

find . -type f -name '.ycm*' -exec stat --printf '%s\t%n\n' {} +

The following would work on a BSD system (for example macOS):

find . -type f -name '.ycm*' -exec stat -f '%z%t%N' {} +

In the BSD stat format string, %z will be replaced by the size in bytes, %t will be replaced by a tab character, and %N will replace by the pathname of the file.

recursion in bash going infinite loop

1 Answers1