I need the character count of the last line of each file in a directory, and not the total.

Now I have been doing this but unfortunately, -exec doesn't support pipes:

find sent/ -type f -exec tail -1|wc -c {} \;

find sent/ -type f -exec tail -1 {} \; | wc -c

Why don't you use a loop:-

for file in sent/*
do
   tail -1 $file | wc -c 
done

for file in $( find sent/ -type f )
do
   tail -1 $file | wc -c 
done

# cat char_last.sh
file=$1
echo "$( tail -1 $file | wc -c ) \t $file"

find sent/ -type f -exec ./char_last.sh {} \;

Hi MIA651,

One way using perl. It prints the file name, a colon and the number of characters in last line:

$ perl -lne 'if ( eof ) { printf qq|%s: %d\n|, $ARGV, length; }' *
3.txt: 12
AAAB.txt: 10
AAAC.txt: 26
file.data: 4

Using awk in the find command:

find sent/ -type f -exec awk 'END{printf("%d\t%s\n",length($0),FILENAME)}' {} \;

Try:

find sent/ -type f -exec tail -1 {} \; | awk '{print length}'

Thank you very much all... From an earlier deleted post, I got the idea and it this is what I've done to have it also print the filename along with it, as you all have got it doing anyway.

find sent/ -type file | while read FILE;
do
 print $FILE
 tail -1 $FILE| wc -c
done

This would break if there are file names with spaces and/or special characters. To avoid that you would need to use properly quoting:

print "$FILE"
tail -1 "$FILE"

$ echo 'eé' | wc -c
       4
$ echo 'eé' | wc -m
       3
$ printf "%s" 'eé' | wc -m
       2