How to find a depth of a directory

Question

Is there a way to find a maximum depth of given directory tree? I was thinking about using find with incrementing maxdepth and comparing number of found directories, but maybe there is a simpler way?

Answer 1

One way to do it, assuming GNU find:

find . -type d -printf '%d\n' | sort -rn | head -1

This is not particularly efficient, but it's certainly much better than trying different -maxdepths in turn.

Answer 2

Try this, for example trying to find max depth of tree under /, using

find / -type d

will give every directory under / irrespective of depth. So awk the result with / as delimiter to find the count, and count-1 would give max depth of tree from /, so the command would be:

find / -type d | awk -F"/" 'NF > max {max = NF} END {print max}'

Answer 3

Consider using updatedb and then locate. It performs really fast, as locate queries a database and it's much faster than asking for each file sepereately. updatedb is fast too, since it only updates the database with changes instead of creating it anew. The only drawback is that you may need root privilages to run updatedb by default, unless you make and preserve your own, user-space database.

Keep in mind that you may have newlines in your filenames, so that you need to be more careful about processing locate's output. Best to use null byte as a filename separator.

To sum it up:

updatedb && locate -0 "$(pwd)" | awk -v RS='\0' -F"/" '{print NF-1}' | sort -n | tail -n1

Thanks @sai sasanka for providing me with a perfect awk script.