I occassioanlly need to scan a folder and all of its subdirectories to see if any of them DO NOT contain files of a certain type.
I'm fully aware you can do this with some combination of shell commands, but I always spent 20 minutes googling for how to do it again every time I needed to. It was faster just to write this small utility myself.
USAGE: dnc --directory <directory> --query <string> [--invert]
OPTIONS:
-d, --directory <directory>
The directory to recursively scan.
-q, --query <string> A string to search for in the filename of the directory's files.
--invert Invert the query. i.e., show directories that DO contain the query.
-h, --help Show help information.
My primary use-case is finding which albums in my music collection (folders on disk) are in a lossy format. This gives me a quick shopping list of used CDs to buy when I need something mindless to do during quarantine.
A typical command would be
dnc -d /path/to/music -q flac
That will output something along the lines of
/path/to/music/Violent Femmes/1999-11-23 - Viva Wisconsin
/path/to/music/Weezer/1994-05-10 - Weezer
/path/to/music/White Denim/2013-10-29 - Corsicana Lemonade
/path/to/music/Yonder Mountain String Band/A Decade of Yonder Live, Vol 9_ 6_29_2006 Apple Valley, MN
/path/to/music/Zero 7/The Garden
which means of all the folders recursively inside /path/to/music, those directories DO NOT contain any flac files.
A key difference of this script than many of the solutions that Google gives me, is I'm not interested in every file that does not match query. I just want to know about any folders that do not contain matching files.
You can use the full command line arguments listed above with --help, or you can quickly run the command on your current directory by only passing a query string like this:
dnc flac
The latest build is available to download on the Releases page. The builds aren't notarized. So be sure to ask Apple if it's OK to run this on your Mac.