How to call a function while using find in bash? - bash

Question

So my objective here is to print a small graph, followed by the file size and the path for the 15 largest files. However, I'm running into issues trying to call the create_graph function on each line. Here's what isn't working
find $path -type f | sort -nr | head -$n | while read line; do
size=$(stat -c '%s' $line)
create_graph $largest $size 50
echo "$size $line"
done
My problem is that it isn't sorting the files, and the files aren't the n largest files. So it appears my "while read line" is messing it all up.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The first command,
find $path -type f
just prints out file names. So it can't sort them by size. If you want to sort them by size, you need to make it print out the size. Try this:
find $path -type f -exec du -b {} \; | sort -nr | cut -f 2 | head -$n | ...
Update:
Actually, only the first part of that seems to do everything you want from it:
find $path -type f -exec du -b {} \; | sort -nr | head -$n
will print out a table with size and filename, sorted by file size, and limited to $n rows.
Of course I don't know what the create_graph does.
Explanation:
find $path -type f -exec du -b {} \;
Find all files (not directories or links) in ${path} or its subdirectories, and execute the command du -b <file> on each.
du -b <file>
will output the size of the file (disk usage). See man du for details.
This will produce something like this:
8880 ./line_too_long/line.o
4470 ./line_too_long/line.f
934 ./random/rand.f
9080 ./random/rand
23602 ./random/monte
7774 ./random/monte.f90
13610 ./format/form
288 ./format/form.f90
411 ./delme.f90
872 ./delme_mod.mod
9029 ./delme
So for each file, it prints the size (-b for 'in bytes').
Then you can do a numerical sort on that.
$ find . -type f -exec du -b {} \; | sort -nr
23602 ./random/monte
13610 ./format/form
9080 ./random/rand
9029 ./delme
8880 ./line_too_long/line.o
7774 ./random/monte.f90
4470 ./line_too_long/line.f
934 ./random/rand.f
872 ./delme_mod.mod
411 ./delme.f90
288 ./format/form.f90
And if you then cut it off after the first, say five entries:
$ find . -type f -exec du -b {} \; | sort -nr | head -5
23602 ./random/monte
13610 ./format/form
9080 ./random/rand
9029 ./delme
8880 ./line_too_long/line.o
Some idea to put that back together:
find . -type f -exec du -b {} \; | sort -nr | head -$n | while read line; do
size=$(cut -d ' ' -f 1 <<< $line)
file=$(cut -d ' ' -f 2 <<< $line)
create_graph $largest $size 50
echo $line
done
Note that I have no idea what create_graph is or what $largest contains. I took that straight out of your script.