Different count for compressed file listing vs directory listing

Question

I was taking a backup of a folder, where I used the following command :

sudo tar -zcvf www.tar.gz /var/www/

It successfully compressed, just for verifying the number of files in the compressed archive, and the directory I ran the following commands :

sudo tar -ztvf www.tar.gz | wc -l -> 186364

ls -R /var/www | wc -l -> 196440

How come the count is different, what am I missing ?

Answer 1

Look at the output without piping to wc to see the difference

$ ls -R www | cat
www:
dir1
dir2
file1

www/dir1:
file1

www/dir2:
file1
file2
$ ls -R www | wc -l
11

And

$ tar xvfz www.tar.gz
www/
www/dir1/
www/dir1/file1
www/dir2/
www/dir2/file1
www/dir2/file2
www/file1
$ tar xvfz www.tar.gz |wc -l
7

ls -R just produces some more output.

Answer 2

ls -R puts some extra empty lines in the output which causes the count to increase.

You can test it by running the command ls -R without piping it to wc -l

Answer 3

Use the tree command

tree -i |tail

this will give you the number of folders and files in particular folder.