Does Not Contain

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.

I call it dnc, which stands for “does not contain”. You can download the source or a pre-built binary on GitHub. The builds aren’t notarized. So be sure to ask Apple if it’s OK to run this on your Mac.

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