Now that I am back from vacation, I had to take care of some chores, like uploading the pictures taken with my digital camera.
I stepped out during the long upload process (400+ pictures). When I returned, it was already done. To just make sure all pictures are now on the server, I wanted to count the number of files in the targetdir directory.
$ ls -1 targetdir | wc -l 454
The above command reads ls dash one piped to wc dash letter l.
Note that if you had used ls dash letter l instead, the count is one greater than the actual number of files. This is because ls dash letter l outputs an extra total line:
$ ls -1 targetdir total 529436 -rw-r--r-- 1 peter peter 1510976 Jul 13 2008 DSCN1001.jpg ....
The above method will count symbolic links as well as subdirectories in targetdir (but not recursively into subdirectories).
If you want to exclude subdirectories, you need a heavier duty tool than ls.
$ find targetdir -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l
-type f ensures that the find command only returns regular files for counting (no subdirectories).
By default, the find command traverses into subdirectories for searching. -maxdepth 1 prevents find from traversing into subdirectories. If you do want to count files in the subdirectories, just remove -maxdepth 1 from the command line.
Note that the find command does NOT classify a symbolic link as a regular file. Therefore, the above find -type f command does not return symbolic links. As a result, the final count excludes all symbolic links.
To include symbolic links, add the -follow option to find.
$ find targetdir -follow -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l
Great howto. Helps alot to newcomers like me ;) Cheers!
ReplyDeleteExactly. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteJust so you know, your ads are against Google's TOS. The banner ad above comments section is cut and it isn't displaying Ads by Google tag on the ad.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info btw, nice site.
Excellent! This was exactly what I had been looking for and more!
ReplyDeleteIf you want to find, let's say, all the php files within a directory_tree, you can try the following:
ReplyDeletels -R -l directory_name | grep .php | wc -l
Hope this helps.
I wanted to know how many files each folder contained so I used this.
ReplyDeletefor i in `ls -al |grep '^d'|awk '{print $9}'|grep -v '\.$'`; do c=`find $i|wc -l`; echo "$c $i"; done;
You can also use:
ReplyDeletefor FOLDER in `find ./ -type d -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1`; do echo $FOLDER; find $FOLDER -type f | wc -l; done
find: warning: you have specified the -maxdepth option after a non-option argument -type, but options are not positional (-maxdepth affects tests specified before it as well as those specified after it). Please specify options before other arguments.
ReplyDeleteNice, i'm newbie with Linux, this command really help to count folder at target dir :D
ReplyDeleteThanks for your help dear.
ReplyDeleteThx for this post. I didn't remember which program counts. :D
ReplyDeleteEhmmm... But one thing: It's probably more efficient if you use
(a 1 (one) instead of a lower case "L" as parameter since it produces less output which might help to improve performance in a directory with very very many files or on a pc which is really slow.)
$ ls -1 | wc -l
Ohh... I did a mistake. -.- I should buy some glasses...... Didn't see the 1 the first time... I thought this is a lower case "L".
ReplyDeleteSorry for this.
Both of the for/do loop options fail on directories with spaces in them, how would one fix that (other than not using spaces in directories)?
ReplyDeleteOr (only count files, shorter):
ReplyDeletefor i in `ls -1b`; do c=`find $i -type f |wc -l`; echo "$c $i"; done;
You do not need to use the long listing with ls to do a count. If you pipe the output of ls it will list the files one line at a time. It is the equivalent of doing ls -1 (thats a number 1)
ReplyDeleteFor example, try 'ls | cat'
Its probably safer to explicitly use -1, as there may be some obscure versions of ls out there that behave differently.
ls -l | grep ^- | wc -l
ReplyDeletels -l | grep ^d | wc -l
ls -l | grep ^l | wc -l
ls -1 | grep -c ""
ReplyDeleteYou don't need the -1.
ReplyDeleteis there any way by which i can count the number of files in the current directory without using ls and wc commands ?
ReplyDeleteGood post! Thanks
ReplyDeleteTo view only regular files, no (dir,symlink,exec):
ReplyDeletels -F | sed '/[/@*]$/d'
iPenguin
Thanks!
ReplyDeletels -1 doesn't count hidden files, but when using ls -1h instead counts two more: . and ..
ReplyDeleteis there no way without enumerating the directory? using some filesystem metadata or somethin.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip.
ReplyDeleteAwesome post...Thanks very much..
ReplyDeleteNice Post
ReplyDeleteHere are some More on Linux
ls and find require read permission to the directory contents. "stat -f%l" (BSD unix) does not. I think it's "stat -c%h" on linux.
ReplyDeleteI prefer the stat solution
ReplyDeleteNice post, this prefer to my problem
ReplyDeleteYou should never use ls for counting files since it will take ages if you got a directory with several million files while find will work much much faster for counting.
ReplyDeleteThank's very usefull article
ReplyDelete