How can I count files with a particular extension, and the directories they are in?

I want to know how many regular files have the extension .c in a large complex directory structure, and also how many directories these files are spread across. The output I want is just those two numbers.

I've seen this question about how to get the number of files, but I need to know the number of directories the files are in too.

• My filenames (including directories) might have any characters; they may start with . or - and have spaces or newlines.
• I might have some symlinks whose names end with .c, and symlinks to directories. I don't want symlinks to be followed or counted, or I at least want to know if and when they are being counted.
• The directory structure has many levels and the top level directory (the working directory) has at least one .c file in it.

I hastily wrote some commands in the (Bash) shell to count them myself, but I don't think the result is accurate...

shopt -s dotglobshopt -s globstarmkdir outfor d in **/; do     find "$d" -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.c">> out/$(basename "$d")donels -1Aq out | wc -lcat out/* | wc -l

This outputs complaints about ambiguous redirects, misses files in the current directory, and trips up on special characters (for example, redirected find output prints newlines in filenames) and writes a whole bunch of empty files (oops).

How can I reliably enumerate my .c files and their containing directories?

In case it helps, here are some commands to create a test structure with bad names and symlinks:

mkdir -p cfiles/{1..3}/{a..b} && cd cfilesmkdir space\ dtouch -- i.c -.c bad\ .c 'terrible.c' not-c .hidden.cfor d in space\ d 1 2 2/{a..b} 3/b; do cp -t "$d" -- *.c; doneln -s 2 dirlinkln -s 3/b/i.c filelink.c

In the resulting structure, 7 directories contain .c files, and 29 regular files end with .c (if dotglob is off when the commands are run) (if I've miscounted, please let me know). These are the numbers I want.

Please feel free not to use this particular test.

_{N.B.: Answers in any shell or other language will be tested & appreciated by me. If I have to install new packages, no problem. If you know a GUI solution, I encourage you to share (but I might not go so far as to install a whole DE to test it) :) I use Ubuntu MATE 17.10.}