Linux count files in dir

How to Count Number of Files within a Directory in Linux

Have you ever racked your brain for a way that you can count the number of files within a directory and sub directories in Linux?

In this brief tutorial, we’ll look at how you can do that in a simple yet accurate way.

1) Using wc command

WC command, short for Word Count, is a command line tool in Unix/Linux systems used for printing newlines, counting number lines & characters in a file. The command can also be combined with other piping operations for general counting functions.

To count the number of files in a directory, use the syntax below

Let us break down the Syntax and see what does what

ls : Lists the files
-1 : This is a ONE. It prints one entry per line. To print hidden files, change it to -1a
| : Pipes output into.
wc : Wordcount
-l : Counts the lines

To count the number of files outside the directory, you can specify the directory name as shown

To demonstrate how this commands works, let’s create a new directory test_folder, and navigate into it.

Next, we are going to create a few text files for demonstration purposes

Let us confirm the existence of the files by listing them using the ls command

Output

Great, now let’s count the files

Output

Similarly, you can exit the directory using cd command

Output

2) Using tree command

tree is a Unix/Linux command line tool that recursively prints directories in a tree-like format. It displays each directory along with any subdirectories within it. In addition, it can also display and print the number of files in a directory.

Navigate into our sample ‘test_folder’

Then, run the tree command

Output

As you can see, the names of the files alongside the count that appears at the bottom listed. Clearly, through observation, the count matches exactly the number of files created earlier on.

4) Rsync Command

We can use rsync command to find the number of files, directories, symlinks.

—dry-run is used not actually transfer the files. /test should be an empty or non-existing folder.

3) Count files recursively through directories and Subdirectories

To recursively count files through directories and subdirectories using the command below

DIR_NAME is the directory name

— type f specifies files only

wc (Word Count) counts newlines, words, and bytes on its input

-l Counts new lines

If you are counting files in the current directory replace the DIR_NAME with a period as shown

To include other subfolders and files within subfolders, leave out the — type f flag.

I hope that this article has been helpful and that now you can comfortably count the number of files within directories and subdirectories. Also, try ncdu tool which is a GUI tool that also helps to find the file count.

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Count Number of Files in a Directory in Linux

I presume you are aware of the wc command for counting number of lines. We can use the same wc command with ls command to count the number of files in a directory.

This task seems simple but could soon turn slightly complex based on your need and definition of counting files. Before I confuse you further, let’s see about various use cases of counting the number of files in Linux.

Count number of files in directory in Linux

Let me first show you the content of the test directory I am going to use in this tutorial:

You can see that it has 9 files (including one hidden file) and 2 sub-directories in that directory. But you don’t have to do it manually. Let’s count the number of files using Linux commands.

Count number of files and directories (without hidden files)

You can simply run the combination of the ls and wc command and it will display the number of files:

This is the output:

There is a problem with this command. It counts all the files and directories in the current directories. But it doesn’t see the hidden files (the files that have name starting with a dot).

This is the reason why the above command showed me a count of 10 files instead of 11 (9 files and 2 directories).

Count number of files and directories including hidden files

You probably already know that -a option of ls command shows the hidden files. But if you use the ls -a command, it also displays the . (present directory) and .. (parent directory). This is why you need to use -A option that displays the hidden files excluding . and .. directories.

This will give you the correct count of files and directories in the current directory. Have a look at the output that shows a count of 11 (9 files and 2 directories):

You can also use this command to achieve the same result:

Note that it the option used is 1 (one) not l (L). Using the l (L) option displays an additional line at the beginning of the output (see ‘total 64’ in the directory output at the beginning of the article). Using 1 (one) lists one content per line excluding the additional line. This gives a more accurate result.

Count number of files and directories including the subdirectories

What you have see so far is the count of files and directories in the current directory only. It doesn’t take into account the files in the subdirectories.

If you want to count the number of files and directories in all the subdirectories, you can use the tree command.

This command shows the directory structure and then displays the summary at the bottom of the output.

As you can see in the output, it shows that there are 7 directories and 20 files in total. The good thing about this result is that it doesn’t count directories in the count of files.

Count only the files, not directories

So far, all the solutions we have seen for counting the number of files, also take directories into account. Directories are essentially files but what if you want to count only the number of files, not directories? You can use the wonderful find command.

You can run this command:

The above command searched for all the files (type f) in current directory and its subdirectories.

Count only the files, not directories and only in current directory, not subdirectories

That’s cool! But what if you want to count the number of files in the current directory only excluding the files in the subdirectories? You can use the same command as above but with a slight difference.

All you have to do is to add the ‘depth’ of your find. If you set it at 1, it won’t enter the subdirectories.

Here’s the output now:

In the end…

In Linux, you can have multiple ways to achieve the same goal. I am pretty sure there can be several other methods to count the number of files in Linux. If you use some other command, why not share it with us?

I hope this Linux tutorial helped you learn a few things. Stay in touch for more Linux tips.

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The fastest way to count the number of files in a directory (including subdirectories)

I’m running a script that looks at all the files in a directory and its subdirectories.

The script has been running for a day, and I’d like to estimate how long it will keep running. I know how many files it processed so far (73,000,000), but I don’t know the total number of files.

What is the fastest way to count the files?

I tried right-clicking on the directory and selecting «properties», and it’s slowly counting up. I tried redirecting ls into a file, and it’s just churning & churning.

Should I write a program in c?

3 Answers 3

The simplest way:

Slightly faster, perhaps:

I did a quick research. Using a directory with 100,000 files I compared the following commands:

I ran them twice, once redirecting into a file ( >file ), and once piping into wc ( |wc -l ). Here are the run times in seconds:

The difference between >file and |wc -l is smaller than the difference between ls and find .

It appears that ls -R is at least 4x faster than find .

Fastest I know about:

Note: keep in mind though that it lists all nodes inside a directory, including subdirectories and the two references to the current and the parent directory ( . & .. ).

If you need the recursive count of files in all subdirectories (as opposed to everything including subdirectories inside the current directory), then you can add the «recursive» flag to the ls command:

If you compare this in speed to the suggestion using find you will see that it is much faster (factor 2 to 10), but keep in mind the note above.

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Find number of files in folder and sub folders?

I want to find the total count of the number of files under a folder and all its sub folders.

9 Answers 9

May be something like

find . -type f | wc -l

would do the trick. Try the command from the parent folder.

-type f finds all files in . and subfolders. The result (a list of files found) is passed ( | ) to wc -l which counts the number of lines. -name

only looks for certain files.

Use the tree command. You might need to install the tree package.

It will list all the files and folders under the given folder and list a summary at the end.

To count files (even files without an extension) at the root of the current directory, use:

To count files (even files without an extension) recursively from the root of the current directory, use:

The fastest and easiest way, is to use tree . Its speed is limited by your output terminal, so if you pipe the result to tail -1 , you’ll get immediate result. You can also control to what directory level you like the results, using the -L option. For colorized output, use -C . For example:

If it’s not already there, you can get it here.

Don’t count the output lines of find, because filenames, containing 99 newlines, will count as 100 files.

Use this command for each folder in the path

You can use find . | wc -l

find . will list all files and folders and theire contents starting in your current folder.
wc -l counts the results of find

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How to count number of files in each directory?

I am able to list all the directories by

I attempted to list the contents of each directory and count the number of files in each directory by using the following command

But this summed the total number of lines returned by

Is there a way I can count the number of files in each directory?

18 Answers 18

This prints the file count per directory for the current directory level:

Assuming you have GNU find, let it find the directories and let bash do the rest:

• find . -type f to find all items of the type file , in current folder and subfolders
• cut -d/ -f2 to cut out their specific folder
• sort to sort the list of foldernames
• uniq -c to return the number of times each foldername has been counted

You could arrange to find all the files, remove the file names, leaving you a line containing just the directory name for each file, and then count the number of times each directory appears:

The only gotcha in this is if you have any file names or directory names containing a newline character, which is fairly unlikely. If you really have to worry about newlines in file names or directory names, I suggest you find them, and fix them so they don’t contain newlines (and quietly persuade the guilty party of the error of their ways).

If you’re interested in the count of the files in each sub-directory of the current directory, counting any files in any sub-directories along with the files in the immediate sub-directory, then I’d adapt the sed command to print only the top-level directory:

The first pattern captures the start of the name, the dot, the slash, the name up to the next slash and the slash, and replaces the line with just the first part, so:

The second replace captures the files directly in the current directory; they don’t have a slash at the end, and those are replace by ./ . The sort and count then works on just the number of names.

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