208

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

topless
  • 7,465

10 Answers10

307

Maybe something like this will do the trick:

find . -type f | wc -l

Try the command from the parent folder.

  • find . -name <pattern> -type f finds all files in the current folder (.) and its subfolders.
  • -name <pattern> only looks for certain files that match the specified pattern. The match is case-sensitive. If you need the match to be case-insensitive, use -iname instead.
  • The result (a list of files found) is passed (|) to wc -l which counts the number of lines.
BeastOfCaerbannog
  • 16,703
sagarchalise
  • 24,306
34

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.

Egil
  • 14,522
24

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

ls -l | grep ^- | wc -l

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

ls -lR | grep ^- | wc -l
Seth
  • 59,332
user38537
  • 693
21

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:

$ tree share/some/directory/ | tail -1
558 directories, 853 files

$ tree -L 2 share/some/directory/ | tail -1
120 directories, 3 files

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

tinlyx
  • 3,328
not2qubit
  • 616
13
find -type f -printf . | wc -c

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

user unknown
  • 6,892
6

Use this command for each folder in the path

for D in *; do echo $D; find $D -type f| wc -l; done
Sriram Murali
  • 474
3

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

david
  • 2,470
1

find seems to be quicker than tree so I used below to count files in each directory of the current working directory (ignoring files in CWD) with allowing directories to have spaces:

ls -d */ | while read dir_line do echo -n "$dir_line :" find "$dir_line" -type f | wc -l done

Mike Bounds
  • 161
0

Benchmark on find vs ls vs tree

hyperfine \
> "find . -type f | wc -l" \
> "ls -lR | grep ^- | wc -l" \
> "tree . | tail -1"
Benchmark 1: find . -type f | wc -l
  Time (mean ± σ):      3.070 s ±  0.030 s    [User: 0.284 s, System: 2.827 s]
  Range (min … max):    3.038 s …  3.126 s    10 runs

Benchmark 2: ls -lR | grep ^- | wc -l
  Time (mean ± σ):      5.887 s ±  0.054 s    [User: 0.896 s, System: 5.160 s]
  Range (min … max):    5.845 s …  6.020 s    10 runs


Benchmark 3: tree . | tail -1
  Time (mean ± σ):      4.475 s ±  0.089 s    [User: 1.254 s, System: 3.280 s]
  Range (min … max):    4.349 s …  4.677 s    10 runs


Summary
  'find . -type f | wc -l' ran
    1.46 ± 0.03 times faster than 'tree . | tail -1'
    1.92 ± 0.03 times faster than 'ls -lR | grep ^- | wc -l'

find seem more efficient on my dir

atmacola
  • 101
0

I'd go with this option myself:

ls -alR | grep -c ^-

Charles
  • 1