Linux count folders in folder

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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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 can I count the number of folders in a drive using Linux?

I need to organise an external HDD such that there is no more than 500 folders on it. Ubuntu’s «Properties» pane shows only the file count, not the folder count.

Is there a simple command line that will tell me the number of subdirectories?

I need to count recursively, and the drive is an external HDD mounted at /media/MUSIC/ . It’s for a car stereo system whose documentation says it only reads the first 500 folders.

9 Answers 9

Navigate to your drive (Can open a terminal window there) and simply execute:

Find all folders in total, including subdirectories:

Find all folders in the root directory (not including subdirectories):

The -maxdepth 1 confines the command to the current directory (i.e., it forbids recursion); the -mindepth 1 causes it not to include the top-level directory (the mount point) itself.

Newlines are valid characters in directory names. I suggest letting find print a character for each directory found and then letting wc count those characters:

Specify -mindepth 1 to avoid counting the mount point directory itself.

Try the following [but see below]:

Note: the first option to ls is dash one , but the option to wc is dash lower case L .

This will print a one-column list of the current directory (including . entries other than . and .. themselves), with trailing slashes for items that are subdirectories, then count the lines with the slashes.

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counting number of directories in a specific directory

How to count the number of folders in a specific directory. I am using the following command, but it always provides an extra one.

For example, if I have 3 folders, this command provides 4. If it contains 5 folders, the command provides 6. Why is that?

17 Answers 17

find is also printing the directory itself:

You can instead test the directory’s children and do not descend into them at all:

You can also use ls :

Get a count of only the directories in the current directory

you will get out put like 1 309 4594

2nd digit represents no. of directories.

tree -L 1 | tail -1

For find -mindepth means total number recusive in directories

-maxdepth means total number recusive in directories

-type d means directory

And for wc -l means count the lines of the input

If you only have directories in the folder and no files this does it:

Best way to navigate to your drive and simply execute

and to Find all folders in total, including subdirectories?

. or find all folders in the root directory (not including subdirectories)?

Run stat -c %h folder and subtract 2 from the result. This employs only a single subprocess as opposed to the 2 (or even 3) required by most of the other solutions here (typically find plus wc ).

cnt=$((`stat -c %h folder` — 2))
echo $cnt # ‘echo’ is a sh/bash builtin, not an additional process

@ cnt = `stat -c %h folder` — 2
echo $cnt # ‘echo’ is a csh/tcsh builtin, not an additional process

Explanation: stat -c %h folder prints the number of hardlinks to folder, and each subfolder under folder contains a ../ entry which is a hardlink back to folder. You must subtract 2 because there are two additional hardlinks in the count:

1. folder‘s own self-referential ./ entry, and
2. folder‘s parent’s link to folder

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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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