How to display number of items in sub-directories from command line

Question

In Ubuntu graphical user-interface, I can list the sub-directories in a directory where one column represents the number of items in these sub-directories. As shown here:

Is there a way to get the same result (number of items in size column) using the command line?

Answer 1

Here's a little shell function that you can use. Just add these lines to your ~/.bashrc:

lsc(){
    ## globs that don't match should expand to a null string
  shopt -s nullglob
  ## If no arguments were given use the current dir
  if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
    targets="."
  ## Otherwise, use whatever was given
  else
    targets=($@)
  fi
  ## iterate over the arguments given
  for target in "${targets[@]}"; do
    ## get the contents of the target
    contents=("$target"/*)
    ## iterate over the contents
    for thing in "${contents[@]}";  do
      ## If this one is a directory
      if [[ -d "$thing" ]]; then
        ## collect the directory's contents
        count=("$thing"/*)
        ## Print the dir's name (with a '/' at the end)
        ## and the number of items found in it
        printf "%s/ (%s)\n" "$thing" "${#count[@]}"
      else
        ## If this isn't a dir, just print the name
        printf "%s\n" "$thing"
      fi
    done
  done
}

then open a new terminal and run:

lsc /path/to/dir

For example, given the following directory (the \012 are newlines in the names):

$ tree
.
├── a bad one
│   └── file 1
├── a bad worse\012one
│   └── file 1 \012two
├── dir1
│   └── file
├── dir2
│   ├── file1
│   └── file2
├── dir3
│   ├── file1
│   ├── file2
│   └── file3
├── dir4
│   └── dir
├── empty_dir

8 directories, 7 files

You would get:

$ lsc 
./a bad one/ (1)
./a bad worse
one/ (1)
./dir1/ (1)
./dir2/ (2)
./dir3/ (3)
./dir4/ (1)
./empty_dir/ (0)
./mp3/ (1)

The main advantages of this approach are:

1. You can run it on multiple directories:

   lsc /path/to/dir /path/to/dir2 ... /path/to/dirN
   

   Or on the current one:

   lsc
   

2. It can work on arbitrary file and directory names, even those containing spaces or newline characters as you can see above.