Recursively count all the files in a directory

Become part of the top 3% of the developers by applying to Toptal https://topt.al/25cXVn

--

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Sunrise at the Stream

--

Chapters
00:00 Question
01:13 Accepted answer (Score 398)
01:48 Answer 2 (Score 50)
02:42 Answer 3 (Score 26)
03:00 Answer 4 (Score 8)
03:16 Thank you

--

Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/198817/r...

Question links:
[How can I count the number of folders in a drive using Linux?]: https://superuser.com/questions/129088/h...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#linux #commandline

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 401

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.

ANSWER 2

Score 25

For files:

find -type f | wc -l

For directories:

find -mindepth 1 -type d | wc -l

They both work in the current working directory.

ANSWER 3

Score 8

With bash 4+

shopt -s globstar
for file in **/*
do
  if [ -d "$file" ];then
    ((d++))
  elif [ -f "$file" ];then
     ((f++))
  fi
done
echo "number of files: $f"
echo "number of dirs: $d"

No need to call find twice if you want to search for files and directories

ANSWER 4

Score 8

Slight update to accepted answer, if you want a count of dirs and such

find $DIR -exec stat -c '%F' {} \; | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn