Linux count files in folder recursively

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.

Источник

Recursively count all the files in a directory [duplicate]

I have a really deep directory tree on my Linux box. I would like to count all of the files in that path, including all of the subdirectories.

For instance, given this directory tree:

If I pass in /home , I would like for it to return four files. Or, bonus points if it returns four files and two directories. Basically, I want the equivalent of right-clicking a folder on Windows and selecting properties and seeing how many files/folders are contained in that folder.

How can I most easily do this? I have a solution involving a Python script I wrote, but why isn’t this as easy as running ls | wc or similar?

5 Answers 5

find . -type f | wc -l

Explanation:
find . -type f finds all files ( -type f ) in this ( . ) directory and in all sub directories, the filenames are then printed to standard out one per line.

This is then piped | into wc (word count) the -l option tells wc to only count lines of its input.

Together they count all your files.

The answers above already answer the question, but I’ll add that if you use find without arguments (except for the folder where you want the search to happen) as in:

the search goes much faster, almost instantaneous, or at least it does for me. This is because the type clause has to run a stat() system call on each name to check its type — omitting it avoids doing so.

This has the difference of returning the count of files plus folders instead of only files, but at least for me it’s enough since I mostly use this to find which folders have huge ammounts of files that take forever to copy and compress them. Counting folders still allows me to find the folders with most files, I need more speed than precision.

Источник

How do I count all the files recursively through directories

I want to see how many files are in subdirectories to find out where all the inode usage is on the system. Kind of like I would do this for space usage

which will give me the space used in the directories off of root, but in this case I want the number of files, not the size.

10 Answers 10

Thanks to Gilles and xenoterracide for safety/compatibility fixes.

The first part: find . -maxdepth 1 -type d will return a list of all directories in the current working directory. (Warning: -maxdepth is a GNU extension and might not be present in non-GNU versions of find .) This is piped to.

The second part: while read -r dir; do (shown above as while read -r dir (newline) do ) begins a while loop – as long as the pipe coming into the while is open (which is until the entire list of directories is sent), the read command will place the next line into the variable dir . Then it continues.

The third part: printf «%s:\t» «$dir» will print the string in $dir (which is holding one of the directory names) followed by a colon and a tab (but not a newline).

The fourth part: find «$dir» -type f makes a list of all the files inside the directory whose name is held in $dir . This list is sent to.

The fifth part: wc -l counts the number of lines that are sent into its standard input.

The final part: done simply ends the while loop.

So we get a list of all the directories in the current directory. For each of those directories, we generate a list of all the files in it so that we can count them all using wc -l . The result will look like:

Источник

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

Источник

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.

Источник