How to list all distinct extensions of tracked files in a git repository?

Question

I'd like to know all distinct extensions of files tracked by git in a given repo, in order to create appropriate .gitattributes file.

Example output expected:

bat
gitignore
gradle
html
jar
java
js
json
md
png
properties
py
svg
webp
xml
yml

What command can I use for that?

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

9

git ls-tree -r HEAD --name-only | perl -ne 'print $1 if m/\.([^.\/]+)$/' | sort -u

When you declare it as an alias, you have to escape $1:

alias gitFileExtensions="git ls-tree -r HEAD --name-only | perl -ne 'print \$1 if m/\.([^.\/]+)$/' | sort -u"

This is better than naive find, because:

it excludes untracked (gitignored) files
it excludes .git directory which contains usually hundreds/thousands of files and hence slows down the search

edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

Community

answered Dec 04 '15 at 12:42

jakub.g

1

Any reason you used double quotes around the perl part? Also maybe it'd be worth using a hash rather than piping to sort - you could add `&& !$a{$1}++` (with single quotes around the whole command) to only print the first occurrence of each result. – Tom Fenech Dec 04 '15 at 14:36
If I use single quotes, it prints `SCALAR(0xa031e3c)SCALAR(0xa031e3c)...`. I have to remove the escape before `$1` for it to work back. But then when I declare an alias, I have to add the escape back. Updated. – jakub.g Dec 04 '15 at 15:23
Yeah, `$` needs escaping from the shell inside double quotes. Better to just use a function in my opinion. – Tom Fenech Dec 04 '15 at 15:28
ad `!$a{$1}++` I tested on a huge git repo (Chrome's blink) and the speed difference is negligible in practice (0.8s vs 1.0s on my machine). I think I'll leave `sort` for readability :) – jakub.g Dec 04 '15 at 15:34

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 28 '22 at 20:59

1

If you have access to PowerShell, here is a nice one-liner which also gives you the count of how many files exist of each type:

$ext = @{}; git ls-tree -r HEAD --name-only | Get-Item | %{ $ext[$_.Extension]++ }; $ext

answered Aug 28 '22 at 20:59

glopes

This just gives me an error. Get-Ittem : Illegal characters in path. – Kim Mar 08 '23 at 08:31

2 Answers2