are firstnames and lastnames always separated by the same character in each filename?
are the names separated from the rest of the info in the filename the same way for each file? are you doing this once, or will this be a repeating task that would be handy to automate? would you be able to provide a few same filenames, perhaps with the personal info obfuscated? generally, the way I would approach this is to pare the filenames down to the people's names, and then run uniq against that list. uniq -c will provide a count of how many times a given string appears in the input. if I'm doing this once, I would generate a text file containing the list of filenames I will be working with, for example: find Processed -type f > processed-files.txt then use a text editor to pare down the entries as described above, using find and replace functions to remove the extra data, so only the people's names remain. then simply uniq -c that file and you're done. I personally use vi for this, but just about any editor will do. I like this approach for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I can spot-check random samples after each editing step to try to spot unexpected results. if you want to automate this, it may be a little more complicated, and the answers to my initial questions become important. if you can provide a little more context, I will try to help further. -wes On Mon, Aug 16, 2021 at 5:01 PM Michael Barnes <barnmich...@gmail.com> wrote: > Here's a fun trivia task. For an activity I am involved in, I get files > from members to process. The filename starts with the member's name and has > other info to identify the file. After processing, the file goes in the > ./Processed folder. There are thousands of files now in that folder. Right > now, I'm looking for a couple basic pieces of information. First, I want to > know how many unique names I have in the list. Second, I'd like a list of > names and how many files go with each name. > > I'm sure this is trivial, but my mind is blanking out on it. A couple > simple examples would be nice. Non-answers, like "easy to do with'xxx'" or > references to man pages or George's Book, etc. are not helpful right now. > > Thanks, > Michael >
