Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How it works...

This script relies on the associative array statarray. This array is indexed by the type of file: PDF, ASCII, and so on. Each index holds the count for that type of file. It is defined by the declare -A statarray command.

The script then consists of two loops: a while loop, that processes the output from the find command, and a for loop, that iterates through the indices of the statarray variable and generates output.

The while loop syntax looks like this:

while read line; 
do something 
done < filename 

For this script, we use the output of the find command instead of a file as input to while.

The (find $path -type f -print) command is equivalent to a filename, but it substitutes the filename with a subprocess output.

Note ...