I want to find the total count of the number of files under a folder and all its sub folders.

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up vote 144 down vote accepted

May be something like

find . -type f | wc -l

would do the trick. Try the command from the parent folder.

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The solution will fail on files which names contain a newline. – user unknown Apr 8 '11 at 14:23
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@user unknown: find . -type f -ls | wc -l – arrange Nov 22 '13 at 21:24
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even faster: find . -type f -print0 | tr -d -c '\0' | wc -c – arrange Nov 22 '13 at 21:44
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@arrange: even faster: find . -type f -printf . | wc -c - I adopt the print for my solution instead of my -exec echo . – user unknown Nov 23 '13 at 3:41
    
Be aware that this also counts hidden files starting with a dot. I consider this a feature rather than a bug, but it is good to know. – cgogolin Jan 17 '16 at 13:13

find seems to be quicker than tree so I used below to count files in each directory of the current working directory (ignoring files in CWD) with allowing directories to have spaces:

ls -d */ | while read dir_line do echo -n "$dir_line :" find "$dir_line" -type f | wc -l done

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Parsing output of ls is very bad idea. – souravc Jul 21 '16 at 14:49
    
Great code, how can I arrange the output lines say in an increasing or decreasing count of files – nightcrawler Nov 19 '17 at 10:08

I'd go with this option myself:

ls -alR | grep -c ^-

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Please add some details ... – Pierre.Vriens May 29 '16 at 7:18

Use this command for each folder in the path

for D in *; do echo $D; find $D -type f| wc -l; done
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The fastest and most easy way, is to use tree. It's speed is limited by your output terminal, so if you pipe the result to tail -1, you'll get immediate result. You can also control to what directory level you like the results, using the -L option. For colorized output, use -C. For example:

$ tree share/some/directory/ | tail -1
558 directories, 853 files

$ tree -L 2 share/some/directory/ | tail -1
120 directories, 3 files

If it's not already there, you can get it here.

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find -type f -printf . | wc -c

Don't count the output lines of find, because filenames, containing 99 newlines, will count as 100 files.

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Filenames containing new lines is an incredibly rare edge case. – DisgruntledGoat Jul 22 '13 at 13:49
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@DisgruntledGoat: So an error will be extremely hard to find. – user unknown Jul 23 '13 at 2:41

To count files (even files without an extension) at the root of the current directory, use:

ls -l | grep ^- | wc -l

To count files (even files without an extension) recursively from the root of the current directory, use:

ls -lR | grep ^- | wc -l
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Use the tree command. You might need to install the tree package.

It will list all the files and folders under the given folder and list a summary at the end.

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You can use find . | wc -l

find . will list all files and folders and theire contents starting in your current folder.
wc -l counts the results of find

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This solution counts also the folders, I gave the mark cause it matched my occasion that I didnt want to count them in :) – topless Apr 8 '11 at 12:12
    
The solution will fail on files which names contain a newline. – user unknown Apr 8 '11 at 14:23

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