macos - Recursively find all files that match a certain pattern

Question

I need to find (or more specifically, count) all files that match this pattern:

*/foo/*.doc

Where the first wildcard asterisk includes a variable number of subdirectories.

Answer 1

With gnu find you can use regex, which (unlike -name) match the entire path:

find . -regex '.*/foo/[^/]*.doc'

To just count the number of files:

find . -regex '.*/foo/[^/]*.doc' -printf '%i
' | wc -l

(The %i format code causes find to print the inode number instead of the filename; unlike the filename, the inode number is guaranteed to not have characters like a newline, so counting is more reliable. Thanks to @tripleee for the suggestion.)

I don't know if that will work on OSX, though.