How do I count all the files recursively through directories

Question

I want to see how many files are in subdirectories in there subdirectories to find out where all the inode usage is on the system. Kind of like I would do this for space usage

du -sh /*

which will basically give me the amount of space used in the directories off root. but in this case I want the number of files, not the size.

Answer 1

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r dir; do printf "%s:\t" "$dir"; find "$dir" | wc -l; done

Thanks to Gilles and xenoterracide for safety/compatability fixes.

The first part: find -maxdepth 1 -type d will return a list of all directories in the current working directory. This is piped to...

The second part: while read -r dir; do begins a while loop - as long as the pipe coming into the while is open (which is until the entire list of directories is sent), the read command will place the next line into the variable "dir". Then it continues...

The third part: printf "%s:\t" "$dir"; will print the string in "$dir" (which is holding one of the directory names) followed by a tab.

The fourth part: find "$dir" makes a list of all the files inside the directory name held in "$dir". This list is sent to..

The fifth part: wc -l; counts the number of lines that are sent into its standard input.

The final part: done simply ends the while loop.

So we get a list of all the directories in the current directory. For each of those directories, we generate a list of all the files in it so that we can count them all using wc -l. The result will look like:

./dir1: 234
./dir2: 11
./dir3: 2199
...

Answer 2

Try:

find /path/to/start/at -type f -print | wc -l

as a starting point, or if you really only want to recurse through the subdirectories of a directory (and skip the files in that top level directory)

find `find /path/to/start/at -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print` -type f -print | wc -l

Answer 3

The following solution counts the actual number of used inodes starting from current directory:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 ls -id | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort -u | wc -l

To get the number of files of the same subset, use:

find . | wc -l

For solutions exploring only subdirectories, without taking into account files in current directory, you can refer to other answers.

Answer 4

Give this a try:

find -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sh -c 'printf "%s\t%s\n" "$(find "{}" -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l)" "{}"'

It should work fine unless filenames include newlines.

Answer 5

Here's a compilation of some useful listing commands (re-hashed based on previous users code):

List folders with file count:

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort | while read -r dir; do n=$(find "$dir" -type f | wc -l); printf "%4d : %s\n" $n "$dir"; done

List folders with non-zero file count:

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort | while read -r dir; do n=$(find "$dir" -type f | wc -l); if [ $n -gt 0 ]; then printf "%4d : %s\n" $n "$dir"; fi; done

List folders with sub-folder count:

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort | while read -r dir; do n=$(find "$dir" -type d | wc -l); let n--; printf "%4d : %s\n" $n "$dir"; done

List folders with non-zero sub-folder count:

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort | while read -r dir; do n=$(find "$dir" -type d | wc -l); let n--; if [ $n -gt 0 ]; then printf "%4d : %s\n" $n "$dir"; fi; done

List empty folders:

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort | while read -r dir; do n=$(find "$dir" | wc -l); let n--; if [ $n -eq 0 ]; then printf "%4d : %s\n" $n "$dir"; fi; done

List non-empty folders with content count:

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort | while read -r dir; do n=$(find "$dir" | wc -l); let n--; if [ $n -gt 0 ]; then printf "%4d : %s\n" $n "$dir"; fi; done