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

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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[@]}

Answer 4

This alternate approach with filtering for format counts all available grub kernel modules:

ls -l /boot/grub/*.mod | wc -l

Answer 5

tree $DIR_PATH | tail -1

Sample Output:

5309 directories, 2122 files

Answer 6

find -type f | wc -l

OR (If directory is current directory)

find . -type f | wc -l