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

Answer 1

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

ls | wc -l

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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).

Answer 4

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

> mkdir emptydir && cd emptydir
> touch $'file with EOL(\n) character in it'
> find -type f
./file with EOL(?) character in it
> 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

> find -type f -exec printf '\n' \; | wc -l
1

Or if your find supports it

> find -type f -printf '\n' | wc -l
1 

Answer 5

ls -l | grep -e -x -e -dr | wc -l 

1. long list
2. filter files and dirs
3. count the filtered line no

Answer 6

For the current directory:

find -type f | wc -l