-x option with commands in a pipe

[ivan94fi]

Hi! Thanks for the awesome utility, it is really a game changer.

I was wondering if I could do something along the lines of

fd <options> -x 'command1 {} | command2'

Specifically, I would like to count the number of files in each directory in the current folder. I tried some alternatives:

fd -t d -d 1 -x 'ls {} | wc -l'  # not what I want: the entire string is treated as a command

fd -t d -d 1 -x ls {} \| wc -l  # not what I want: the escaped pipe, "wc" and "-l" are given in input to ls

fd -t d -d 1 -x ls {} | wc -l  # not what I want: the entire output of fd is piped in wc

This can be done with a for loop, but it would be good to avoid this:

for d in $(fd -t d -d 1); do ls $d | wc -l; done

[tavianator]

Something like -x sh -c 'ls -1 "$1" | wc -l' sh {} will work.

[ivan94fi]

Hi!

Thanks, this works as expected.

[ivan94fi]

EDIT: see comment below on differences between this version and the original version by @tavianator.

---

Hi, a small update on this. I figured a simpler way to execute commands with pipes , avoiding the double sh invocation. I tested it on a directory with spaces in subdirectory names and it seems to work the same as @tavianator answer.

Here is the reviewed command:

fd -x sh -c 'ls "{}" | wc -l'

The -1 argument to ls can be dropped as it is the default behaviour of ls when the output file is a pipe. Also, the second shell invocation is removed.

I think this version is equivalent to the previous, but I may miss some edge cases.
This version definitely misses some edge cases.

P.S.
This also works with more complex commands: I personally used this to extract selected infos from videos, using a combination of mediainfo and jq:

fd -x sh -c "mediainfo --Output=JSON {} | jq '.media.track | .[] | select(.\"@type\" == \"Video\") | .Height'"

[tavianator]

My command didn't have a double sh invocation. The second sh is just the zeroth argument to the shell command, it could be foo or something instead.

The reason to do $1 instead of {} is in case you have a file named "; sudo rm -rf /; : ". My version is safe, but yours will potentially execute commands from files with strange names.

[ivan94fi]

Perfect! I knew I was missing something! Thanks again