Hi All,

This is the first time I have posted to this forum so please bear with me. Thanks also advance for any help or guidance.

For a project I need to do the following.

1. There are multiple files in multiple locations so I need to find them and the location. So I had planned to use
cd LOCATION;
find . -name "FILENAME.TXT" -type f -print > $HOME/list_of_locations.txt

this gives my paths in this format ./dir1/dir2/dir3/FILENAME.txt

2. Each one of these files is of a different format and the only way to work out the different format is to count the number of occurances of the "|" string in each file.

I can either use head -l to take first row and count the number of occurences of the "|" character or else grep the "|" in all rows and divide by the wc -l (number of lines). My preference is on the most efficient.

3. I want to produce a new file listing the full path and the number of occurrences of the "|" character so then I can process the .txt file later. If the number of occurences can somehow be concatenated onto the list_of_locations.txt in 1 or else a new file created with this information.

So what I am asking:

Is there a quick way of doing this?
Using find . -name is very slow - but looks like there is no other way as I am doing a recursive search across subdirectories.
Is there a better way to interogate my .txt file to find out how many "|" characters there are?
Is there a better way to put all of this into a UNIX script?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give either code snippit or advice.

Regards,
Charlie.