Recursively find all files that match a certain pattern

Question

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.

Accepted Answer

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
' | 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.

Recursively find all files that match a certain pattern

Solution

Problem