Question

I have a bash script to add some files of a project to git and then synchronize that branch, as the amount of files has increased i have noticed the script has become much slower, so i want to figure out if I’m doing it the correct way.

This is the section of the script where the files are added:

echo "Adding files..."
find . -name '*.js' -exec git add {} \;
find . -name '*.html' -exec git add {} \;
find . -name '*.css' -exec git add {} \;
find . -name '*.py' -exec git add {} \;
find . -name '*.txt' -exec git add {} \;
find . -name '*.jpg' -exec git add {} \;
find . -name '*.sh' -exec git add {} \;

echo "Commit"
git commit -m "'$1'"

I’m not sure if making one single call to find would be faster than having all these separated commands, but I did it this way so it was simpler to remove some types of file or add new ones.

I would really appreciate any suggestion to make this more efficient, using the commands in a different way or using different commands is a completely acceptable answer.

Answer 1

find . \( -name '*.js'   -o \
          -name '*.html' -o \
          -name '*.css'  -o \
          -name '*.py'   -o \
          -name '*.txt'  -o \
          -name '*.jpg'  -o \
          -name '*.sh'   \) -exec git add {} +

This means you only scan the directory structure once, which is the primary way of speeding up ‘multiple finds’; you replace ‘multiple’ with ‘one’. The + is a POSIX 2008 addition to find but makes it act more like xargs all on its own. If it isn’t available to you, consider using -print and xargs (or, if you’re likely to have blanks in names and you have GNU find and xargs, then -print0 and xargs -0, but if you have them, you (probably — but see comment) have the + notation too).