Tiny Tool: file types in a directory

I needed to understand directories with far too many files – first stop, were they all equivalent types?

I asked an LLM for help – after an iteration or two, it came up with this, which I've set up with /var/log to work as an example. Change /var/log to . to do the local directory, and you won't need to sudo.

sudo find /var/log -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file --mime-type | cut -d: -f2- | tr -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

What's it doing?

• find all files, and output them as a null-delimited list
• use file on each to pick out the mime type
• cut the filetype and and trim spaces
• use sort and uniq to get a -count of how many of each type
• sort that list putting biggest first.