Ubuntu – Select a particular result from completion suggestions

I haven't examined the output with symlinks but:

find . -type f -iname '*.c' -printf '%h\0' |
  sort -z |
  uniq -zc |
  sed -zr 's/([0-9]) .*/\1 1/' |
  tr '\0' '\n' |
  awk '{f += $1; d += $2} END {print f, d}'

• The find command prints the directory name of each .c file it finds.
• sort | uniq -c will gives us how many files are in each directory (the sort might be unnecessary here, not sure)
• with sed, I replace the directory name with 1, thus eliminating all possible weird characters, with just the count and 1 remaining
• enabling me to convert to newline-separated output with tr
• which I then sum up with awk, to get the total number of files and the number of directories that contained those files. Note that d here is essentially the same as NR. I could have omitted inserting 1 in the sed command, and just printed NR here, but I think this is slightly clearer.

Up until the tr, the data is NUL-delimited, safe against all valid filenames.

With zsh and bash, you can use printf %q to get a quoted string, which would not have newlines in it. So, you might be able to do something like:

shopt -s globstar dotglob nocaseglob
printf "%q\n" **/*.c | awk -F/ '{NF--; f++} !c[$0]++{d++} END {print f, d}'

However, even though ** is not supposed to expand for symlinks to directories, I could not get the desired output on bash 4.4.18(1) (Ubuntu 16.04).

$ shopt -s globstar dotglob nocaseglob
$ printf "%q\n" ./**/*.c | awk -F/ '{NF--; f++} !c[$0]++{d++} END {print f, d}'
34 15
$ echo $BASH_VERSION
4.4.18(1)-release

But zsh worked fine, and the command can be simplified:

$ printf "%q\n" ./**/*.c(D.:h) | awk '!c[$0]++ {d++} END {print NR, d}'
29 7

D enables this glob to select dot files, . selects regular files (so, not symlinks), and :h prints only the directory path and not the filename (like find's %h) (See sections on Filename Generation and Modifiers). So with the awk command we just need to count the number of unique directories appearing, and the number of lines is the file count.