How to count number of files in each directory?

Question

I am able to list all the directories by

find ./ -type d

I attempted to list the contents of each directory and count the number of files in each directory by using the following command

find ./ -type d | xargs ls -l | wc -l

But this summed the total number of lines returned by

find ./ -type d | xargs ls -l

Is there a way I can count the number of files in each directory?

Answer 1

This prints the file count per directory for the current directory level:

du -a | cut -d/ -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Answer 2

Assuming you have GNU find, let it find the directories and let bash do the rest:

find . -type d -print0 | while read -d '' -r dir; do
    files=("$dir"/*)
    printf "%5d files in directory %s\n" "${#files[@]}" "$dir"
done

Answer 3

find . -type f | cut -d/ -f2 | sort | uniq -c

• find . -type f to find all items of the type file, in current folder and subfolders
• cut -d/ -f2 to cut out their specific folder
• sort to sort the list of foldernames
• uniq -c to return the number of times each foldername has been counted

Answer 4

You could arrange to find all the files, remove the file names, leaving you a line containing just the directory name for each file, and then count the number of times each directory appears:

find . -type f |
sed 's%/[^/]*$%%' |
sort |
uniq -c

The only gotcha in this is if you have any file names or directory names containing a newline character, which is fairly unlikely. If you really have to worry about newlines in file names or directory names, I suggest you find them, and fix them so they don't contain newlines (and quietly persuade the guilty party of the error of their ways).

---

If you're interested in the count of the files in each sub-directory of the current directory, counting any files in any sub-directories along with the files in the immediate sub-directory, then I'd adapt the sed command to print only the top-level directory:

find . -type f |
sed -e 's%^\(\./[^/]*/\).*$%\1%' -e 's%^\.\/[^/]*$%./%' |
sort |
uniq -c

The first pattern captures the start of the name, the dot, the slash, the name up to the next slash and the slash, and replaces the line with just the first part, so:

./dir1/dir2/file1

is replaced by

./dir1/

The second replace captures the files directly in the current directory; they don't have a slash at the end, and those are replace by ./. The sort and count then works on just the number of names.

Answer 5

Here's one way to do it, but probably not the most efficient.

find -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 bash -c 'echo -n "$1:"; ls -1 "$1" | wc -l' --

Gives output like this, with directory name followed by count of entries in that directory. Note that the output count will also include directory entries which may not be what you want.

./c/fa/l:0
./a:4
./a/c:0
./a/a:1
./a/a/b:0

Answer 6

Slightly modified version of Sebastian's answer using find instead of du (to exclude file-size-related overhead that du has to perform and that is never used):

 find ./ -mindepth 2 -type f | cut -d/ -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

-mindepth 2 parameter is used to exclude files in current directory. If you remove it, you'll see a bunch of lines like the following:

  234 dir1
  123 dir2
    1 file1
    1 file2
    1 file3
      ...
    1 fileN

(much like the du-based variant does)

If you do need to count the files in current directory as well, use this enhanced version:

{ find ./ -mindepth 2 -type f | cut -d/ -f2 | sort && find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type f | cut -d/ -f1; } | uniq -c | sort -nr

The output will be like the following:

  234 dir1
  123 dir2
   42 .

Answer 7

Everyone else's solution has one drawback or another.

find -type d -readable -exec sh -c 'printf "%s " "$1"; ls -1UA "$1" | wc -l' sh {} ';'

Explanation:

• -type d: we're interested in directories.
• -readable: We only want them if it's possible to list the files in them. Note that find will still emit an error when it tries to search for more directories in them, but this prevents calling -exec for them.
• -exec sh -c BLAH sh {} ';': for each directory, run this script fragment, with $0 set to sh and $1 set to the filename.
• printf "%s " "$1": portably and minimally print the directory name, followed by only a space, not a newline.
• ls -1UA: list the files, one per line, in directory order (to avoid stalling the pipe), excluding only the special directories . and ..
• wc -l: count the lines

Answer 8

This can also be done with looping over ls instead of find

for f in */; do echo "$f -> $(ls $f | wc -l)"; done

Explanation:

for f in */; - loop over all directories

do echo "$f -> - print out each directory name

$(ls $f | wc -l) - call ls for this directory and count lines

Answer 9

This should return the directory name followed by the number of files in the directory.

findfiles() {
    echo "$1" $(find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l)
}

export -f findfiles

find ./ -type d -exec bash -c 'findfiles "$0"' {} \;

Example output:

./ 6
./foo 1
./foo/bar 2
./foo/bar/bazzz 0
./foo/bar/baz 4
./src 4

The export -f is required because the -exec argument of find does not allow executing a bash function unless you invoke bash explicitly, and you need to export the function defined in the current scope to the new shell explicitly.

Answer 10

My answer is a little different, due to the options of find, you can actually be much more flexible. Just try:

find . -type f -printf "%h\n" | sort | uniq -c

With the "%h" option to "-printf", find prints only the directory of the files it found. Then sort and count with "uniq -c". This prints the number of search result entries with the same directory, per directory.

Using further options on find, you can be much more flexible. For example, to get an overview how many files in which directory have been modified at a certain date, use:

find . -newermt "2022-01-01 00:00:00" -type f -printf "%TY-%Tm-%Td %h\n" | sort | uniq -c

This finds all files that have been modified since 1. January 2022, prints (with "-printf") the modification date and the directory, then sorts and counts them. In this example, each line in the result has the number of files, the date of modification (without time), and the directory.

Note that "-printf" may not be available in all versions of find I think.

Answer 11

find . -type f -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c

gives for example:

  5 .
  4 ./aln
  5 ./aln/iq
  4 ./bs
  4 ./ft
  6 ./hot

Answer 12

I combined @glenn jackman's answer and @pcarvalho's answer(in comment list, there is something wrong with pcarvalho's answer because the extra style control function of character '`'(backtick)).

My script can accept path as an augument and sort the directory list as ls -l, also it can handles the problem of "space in file name".

#!/bin/bash
OLD_IFS="$IFS"
IFS=$'\n'
for dir in $(find $1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | sort); 
do
    files=("$dir"/*)
    printf "%5d,%s\n" "${#files[@]}" "$dir"
done
FS="$OLD_IFS"

My first answer in stackoverflow, and I hope it can help someone ^_^

Answer 13

THis could be another way to browse through the directory structures and provide depth results.

find . -type d  | awk '{print "echo -n \""$0"  \";ls -l "$0" | grep -v total | wc -l" }' | sh 

Answer 14

I tried with some of the others here but ended up with subfolders included in the file count when I only wanted the files. This prints ./folder/path<tab>nnn with the number of files, not including subfolders, for each subfolder in the current folder.

for d in `find . -type d -print` 
do 
  echo -e "$d\t$(find $d -maxdepth 1 -type f -print | wc -l)"
done

Answer 15

This will give the overall count.

for file in */; do echo "$file -> $(ls $file | wc -l)"; done | cut -d ' ' -f 3| py --ji -l 'numpy.sum(l)'

Answer 16

A super fast miracle command, which recursively traverses files to count the number of images in a directory and organize the output by image extension:

find . -type f | sed -e 's/.*\.//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | grep -Ei '(tiff|bmp|jpeg|jpg|png|gif)$'

Credits: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/386135/354980

Answer 17

I edited the script in order to exclude all node_modules directories inside the analyzed one.

This can be used to check if the project number of files is exceeding the maximum number that the file watcher can handle.

find . -type d ! -path "*node_modules*" -print0 | while read -d '' -r dir; do
    files=("$dir"/*)
    printf "%5d files in directory %s\n" "${#files[@]}" "$dir"
done

To check the maximum files that your system can watch:

cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

node_modules folder should be added to your IDE/editor excluded paths in slow systems, and the other files count shouldn't ideally exceed the maximum (which can be changed though).

Answer 18

Easy Method:

find ./|grep "Search_file.txt" |cut -d"/" -f2|sort |uniq -c

Answer 19

In my case I needed the count at subfolder level, so I did:

du -a | cut -d/ -f3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Answer 20

Easy way to recursively find files of a given type. In this case, .jpg files for all folders in current directory:

find . -name *.jpg -print | wc -l

Answer 21

omg why the complex commands. just use something like

find whatever_folder | wc -l