Recursively counting files in a Linux directory

Question

How can I recursively count files in a Linux directory   I found this   find DIR NAME -type f    wc -l   But when I run this it returns the following error      find  paths must precede expression

User · Accepted Answer

This should work   find DIR NAME -type f   wc -l   Explanation    -type f to include only files     and not     redirects find command s standard output to wc command s standard input  wc  short for word count  counts newlines  words and bytes on its input  docs   -l to count just newlines    Notes     Replace DIR NAME with   to execute the command in the current folder  You can also remove the -type f to include directories  and symlinks  in the count  It s possible this command will overcount if filenames can contain newline characters    Explanation of why your example does not work   In the command you showed  you do not use the  Pipe      to kind-of connect two commands  but the broken bar      which the shell does not recognize as a command or something similar  That s why you get that error message

User · Answer

Since filenames in UNIX may contain newlines  yes  newlines   wc -l might count too many files  I would print a dot for every file and then count the dots   find DIR NAME -type f -printf       wc -c

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find  -type f   wc -l  OR  If directory is current directory   find   -type f    wc -l

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There are many correct answers here  Here s another   find   -type f   sort   uniq -w 10 -c   where   is the folder to look in and 10 is the number of characters by which to group the directory

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With bash   Create an array of entries with     and get the count with     FILES        echo    FILES       Ok that doesn t recursively count files but I wanted to show the simple option first  A common use case might be for creating rollover backups of a file  This will create logfile 1  logfile 2  logfile 3 etc   CNT    logfile    mv logfile logfile    CNT       Recursive count with bash 4  globstar enabled  as mentioned by  tripleee   FILES         echo    FILES       To get the count of files recursively we can still use find in the same way   FILES   find   -type f    echo    FILES

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If you want to know how many files and sub-directories exist from the present working directory you can use this one-liner  find   -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0   xargs -0 -I    sh -c  echo -e   find      wc -l        sort -n   This will work in GNU flavour  and just omit the -e from the echo command for BSD linux  e g  OSX

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For directories with spaces in the name      based on various answers above  -- recursively print directory name with number of files within   find   -mindepth 1 -type d -print0   while IFS  read -r -d    i   do echo -n  i       ls -p   i    grep -v     wc -l   done     Example  formatted for readability    pwd    mnt Vancouver Programming scripts claws corpus  ls -l   total 8   drwxr-xr-x 2 victoria victoria 4096 Mar 28 15 02  Catabolism - Autophagy  Phagosomes  Mitophagy    drwxr-xr-x 3 victoria victoria 4096 Mar 29 16 04  Catabolism - Lysosomes   ls  Catabolism - Autophagy  Phagosomes  Mitophagy     wc -l   138     2 dir  one with 28 files  other with 1 file   ls  Catabolism - Lysosomes     wc -l   29   The directory structure is better visualized using tree   tree -L 3 -F          -- Catabolism - Autophagy  Phagosomes  Mitophagy            -- 1           -- 10           --       SNIP   138 files  total                  -- 98           -- 99    -- Catabolism - Lysosomes         -- 1        -- 10        --       SNIP   28 files  total               -- 8        -- 9        -- aaa             -- bbb    3 directories  167 files  man find   grep mindep   -mindepth levels     Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels      a non-negative integer    -mindepth 1 means process all files     except the starting-points    ls -p   grep -v    used below  is from answer 2 at https   unix stackexchange com questions 48492 list-only-regular-files-but-not-directories-in-current-directory  find   -mindepth 1 -type d -print0   while IFS  read -r -d    i   do echo -n  i       ls -p   i    grep -v     wc -l   done   Catabolism - Autophagy  Phagosomes  Mitophagy  138   Catabolism - Lysosomes  28   Catabolism - Lysosomes aaa  1     Applcation   I want to find the max number of files among several hundred directories  all depth   1   output below again formatted for readability    date  pwd     Fri Mar 29 20 08 08 PDT 2019      home victoria Mail 2 RESEARCH - NEWS  time find   -mindepth 1 -type d -print0   while IFS  read -r -d    i   do echo -n  i       ls -p   i    grep -v     wc -l   done  gt        aaa     0 00 03   victoria victoria 2 RESEARCH - NEWS   head -n5       aaa       RNA - Exosomes  26       Cellular Signaling - Receptors  213       Catabolism - Autophagy  Phagosomes  Mitophagy  138       Stress - Physiological  Cellular - General  261       Ancient DNA  Ancient Protein  34   victoria victoria 2 RESEARCH - NEWS   sed -r  s          0-9  1 8     2   1 g        aaa   sort -V    head  echo     tail       0    Genomics - Gene Drive     1    Causality  Causal Relationships     1    Cloning     1    GenMAPP 2     1    Pathway Interaction Database     1    Wasps     2    Cellular Signaling - Ras-MAPK Pathway     2    Cell Death - Ferroptosis     2    Diet - Apples     2    Environment - Waste Management      988    Genomics - PPM  Personalized  amp  Precision Medicine      1113    Microbes - Pathogens  Parasites     1418    Health - Female     1420    Immunity  Inflammation - General     1522    Science  Research - Miscellaneous     1797    Genomics     1910    Neuroscience  Neurobiology     2740    Genomics - Functional     3943    Cancer     4375    Health - Disease    sort -V is a natural sort       So  my max number of files in any of those  Claws Mail  directories is 4375 files   If I left-pad  https   stackoverflow com a 55409116 1904943  those filenames -- they are all named numerically  starting with 1  in each directory -- and pad to 5 total digits  I should be ok     Addendum  Find the total number of files  subdirectories in a directory     date  pwd Tue 14 May 2019 04 08 31 PM PDT  home victoria Mail 2 RESEARCH - NEWS    ls   head  echo  ls   tail Acoustics Ageing Ageing - Calorie  Dietary  Restriction Ageing - Senescence Agriculture  Aquaculture  Fisheries Ancient DNA  Ancient Protein Anthropology  Archaeology Ants Archaeology ARO-Relevant Literature  News  Transcriptome - CAGE Transcriptome - FISSEQ Transcriptome - RNA-seq Translational Science  Medicine Transposons USACEHR-Relevant Literature Vaccines Vision  Eyes  Sight Wasps Women in Science  Medicine    find   -type f   wc -l 70214       files    find   -type d   wc -l 417         subdirectories

User · Answer

You can use    tree   after installing the tree package with    sudo apt-get install tree    on a Debian   Mint   Ubuntu Linux machine    The command shows not only the count of the files  but also the count of the directories  separately  The option -L can be used to specify the maximum display level  which  by default  is the maximum depth of the directory tree    Hidden files can be included too by supplying the -a option

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If what you need is to count a specific file type recursively  you can do   find YOUR PATH -name    html  -type f   wc -l    -l is just to display the number of lines in the output   If you need to exclude certain folders  use -not -path  find   -not -path    node modules    -name    js  -type f   wc -l

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I have written ffcnt to speed up recursive file counting under specific circumstances  rotational disks and filesystems that support extent mapping   It can be an order of magnitude faster than ls or find based approaches  but YMMV

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tree  DIR PATH   tail -1   Sample Output      5309 directories  2122 files

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To determine how many files there are in the current directory  put in ls -1   wc -l  This uses wc to do a count of the number of lines  -l  in the output of ls -1  It doesn t count dotfiles  Please note that ls -l  that s an  L  rather than a  1  as in the previous examples  which I used in previous versions of this HOWTO will actually give you a file count one greater than the actual count  Thanks to Kam Nejad for this point   If you want to count only files and NOT include symbolic links  just an example of what else you could do   you could use ls -l   grep -v  l   wc -l  that s an  L  not a  1  this time  we want a  long  listing here   grep checks for any line beginning with  l   indicating a link   and discards that line  -v    Relative speed   ls -1  usr bin    wc -l  takes about 1 03 seconds on an unloaded 486SX25   usr bin  on this machine has 355 files    ls -l  usr bin    grep -v  l   wc -l  takes about 1 19 seconds   Source  http   www tldp org HOWTO Bash-Prompt-HOWTO x700 html

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If you want a breakdown of how many files are in each dir under your current dir   for i in          do      echo -n  i             find   i  -type f   wc -l     done   That can go all on one line  of course   The parenthesis clarify whose output wc -l is supposed to be watching  find  i -type f in this case

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For the current directory   find -type f   wc -l

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On my computer  rsync is a little bit faster than find   wc -l in the accepted answer     rsync --stats --dry-run -ax  path to dir  tmp  Number of files  173076 Number of files transferred  150481 Total file size  8414946241 bytes Total transferred file size  8414932602 bytes   The second line has the number of files  150 481 in the above example  As a bonus you get the total size as well  in bytes    Remarks    the first line is a count of files  directories  symlinks  etc all together  that s why it is bigger than the second line  the --dry-run  or -n for short  option is important to not actually transfer the files  I used the -x option to  don t cross filesystem boundaries   which means if you execute it for   and you have external hard disks attached  it will only count the files on the root partition

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Combining several of the answers here together  the most useful solution seems to be   find   -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0   xargs -0 -I    sh -c  echo -e   find      -printf   n    wc -l          sort -n   It can handle odd things like file names that include spaces parenthesis and even new lines  It also sorts the output by the number of files   You can increase the number after -maxdepth to get sub directories counted too  Keep in mind that this can potentially take a long time  particularly if you have a highly nested directory structure in combination with a high -maxdepth number

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This alternate approach with filtering for format counts all available grub kernel modules    ls -l  boot grub   mod   wc -l

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This will work completely fine  Simple short  If you want to count the number of files present in a folder   ls   wc -l

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If you want to avoid error cases  don t allow wc -l to see files with newlines  which it will count as 2  files   e g  Consider a case where we have a single file with a single EOL character in it   gt  mkdir emptydir  amp  amp  cd emptydir  gt  touch   file with EOL  n  character in it   gt  find -type f   file with EOL    character in it  gt  find -type f   wc -l 2   Since at least gnu wc does not appear to have an option to read count a null terminated list  except from a file   the easiest solution would just be to not pass it filenames  but a static output each time a file is found  e g  in the same directory as above   gt  find -type f -exec printf   n       wc -l 1   Or if your find supports it   gt  find -type f -printf   n    wc -l 1

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ls -l   grep -e -x -e -dr   wc -l     long list  filter files and dirs count the filtered line no

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You can use the command ncdu  It will recursively count how many files a Linux directory contains  Here is an example of output     It has a progress bar  which is convenient if you have many files     To install  it on Ubuntu   sudo apt-get install -y ncdu     Benchmark  I used https   archive org details cv corpus v1 tar  380390 files  11 GB  as the folder where one has to count the number of files     find   -type f   wc -l  around 1m20s to complete ncdu  around 1m20s to complete

[linux] Recursively counting files in a Linux directory

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