Count files and directories using shell script

Question

I\'m learning bash scripting and have written a script to count the files and directories in the directory that is supplied as argument. I have it working one way which seem

Answer 1

To just solve the problem you can use:

FILECOUNT=$(find $LOCATION -type f | wc -l)
DIRCOUNT=$(find $LOCATION -type d | wc -l)

find will look for all files (-type f) or directories (-type d) recursively under $LOCATION; wc -l will count the number of lines written to stdout in each case.

However if you want to learn, the bash script may be a better way. Some comments:

• If you want to look for files/directories in $LOCATION only (not recursively under their subdirectories etc), you can use for item in $LOCATION/*, where the * will expand to the list of files/directories in the $LOCATION directory. The missing * is why your original script returns 0/1 (becasue the $LOCATION directory itself is the only item counted).
• You may want to check first that $LOCATION is actually a directory with [ -d $LOCATION ].
• For arithmetic expressions, use $(( ... )), for example FILECOUNT=$(( FILECOUNT + 1 )).
• If you want to find all files/directories recursively, you could combine find with a loop.

Example:

find $LOCATION | while read item; do
    # use $item here...
done

Answer 2

You're not iterating over the list of files inside the given directory; add /* after $LOCATION. Your script should look like:

...
for item in $LOCATION/*
do
...

As pointed by dogbane, just adding /* will count only files that does not begin with .; for doing so, you shall do the following:

...
for item in $LOCATION/* $LOCATION/.*
do
...

Answer 3

Use

find $LOCATION -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l

For the count of files, and

find $LOCATION -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l

For counting directories

Answer 4

Use find as shown below. This solution will count filenames with spaces, newlines and dotfiles correctly.

FILECOUNT="$(find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -printf x | wc -c)"
DIRCOUNT="$(find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -printf x | wc -c)"

Note that the DIRCOUNT includes the current directory (.). If you do not want this, subtract 1.

((DIRCOUNT--)) # to exclude the current directory

Answer 5

... am wondering if there is a simpler way of doing it.

If you say so ;)

Alternatively, reduce your script to

find /path/to/directory | wc -l

For current directory, do:

find . | wc -l