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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I've got a directory that contains directories that contain directories that contain files. I'd like to select two files at random from each leaf directory. I found this question about selecting from a single directory, but running it in each of several hundred directories would be a pain.

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Do you strictly want to enumerate files like dir/sub1/subsub1/file1, or can the depth vary from one leaf directory to another? –  Gilles Jun 1 at 21:41
    
Strictly full-depth. If the leaf directories are anywhere else, it means something in my music collection isn't sorted correctly. –  Mark Jun 1 at 21:44

2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

With a fixed depth of the directory structure (per your description, a directory with subsubdirectories with files), you could do something like:

for subsubdir in "$directory"/*/*/
do
    find "$subsubdir" -type f | shuf -n 2
done | shuf

The final | shuf in the assumption that you want the list to be randomized as a whole, and not sorted by directory. Otherwise just drop it.

If you expect newlines in your filenames, you can switch to zero-terminated list of files.

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Please note that find "$dir" -type f will also find files in subdirectories. Add -maxdepth 1 to prevent that. –  lcd047 Jun 1 at 7:08
    
@lcd047 if there are subdirectories, the result is not what he wanted anyhow. naturally there aren't supposed to be any subdirectories (beyond a fixed depth determined by */*/*/) in this approach. –  frostschutz Jun 1 at 12:13
    
edited the answer, maybe this makes the intention clearer –  frostschutz Jun 1 at 12:22
up vote 1 down vote

You can do it like this:

find /some/dir -type d -not -empty -exec sh -c 'find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f | shuf -n 2' sh {} \;

This isn't necessarily the most efficient way of doing it though. :)

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