Handling spaces in filenames in bash

Question

I have this dir structure:

ParentDir
 |
 -- Child Dir1
     |
     -- File One.txt
     -- File
 |
 -- Child Dir2
     |
     -- File Two.txt
     -- File

I'm trying to find out all the .txt files and count the sum total of number of lines in them, so I do something like this:

TXTFILES=$(find . -name '*.txt')
cat $TXTFILES | wc -l

but the problem is, I get,

cat: ./Child: No such file or directory
cat: Dir2/File: No such file or directory
cat: Two.txt: No such file or directory
cat: ./Child: No such file or directory
cat: Dir1/File: No such file or directory
cat: One.txt: No such file or directory

How do I handle spaces in the Dir & File names in such a situation? Is it possible without using a loop?

Answer 1

If you don't need to store the file names in a variable, you can do this in 1 line:

find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l

find supports a -print0 option that makes it use a null byte, rather than a space, to separate the file names. xargs supports a -0 (hyphen zero) switch to tell it the incoming file names are separated by a null byte rather than a space.

Answer 2

find . -name '*.txt' -exec cat -- '{}' ';' | wc -l

This runs cat individually for each file (which is less than ideal), but the filename is passed directly from find to cat without being parsed by the shell. So the filename could be anything that's problematic on the command line.

Answer 3

dirty and quick:

ls -1FR|grep -c '\.txt$'

zsh:

ls **/*.txt|wc -l

Answer 4

You can surround your files name path by " " like this

find . -name '*.txt' | sed -e 's/^/"/g' -e 's/$/"/g' | wc -l

Example :

prompt$ touch a.txt "a a.txt"

prompt$ find . -name '*.txt' | sed -e 's/^/"/g' -e 's/$/"/g'
"./a a.txt"
"./a.txt"

prompt$ find . -name '*.txt' | sed -e 's/^/"/g' -e 's/$/"/g' | wc -l
2