37

I would like a BASH command to list just the count of files in each subdirectory of a directory.

E.g. in directory /tmp there are dir1, dir2, ... I'd like to see :

`dir1` : x files 
`dir2` : x files ...
jldupont
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9 Answers9

49

Assuming you want a recursive count of files only, not directories and other types, something like this should work:

find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do
  printf "%-25.25s : " "$dir"
  find "$dir" -type f | wc -l
done
Thor
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20

This task fascinated me so much that I wanted to figure out a solution myself. It doesn't even take a while loop and MAY be faster in execution speed. Needless to say, Thor's efforts helped me a lot to understand things in detail.

So here's mine:

find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec sh -c 'echo "{} : $(find "{}" -type f | wc -l)" file\(s\)' \;

It looks modest for a reason, for it's way more powerful than it looks. :-)

However, should you intend to include this into your .bash_aliases file, it must look like this:

alias somealias='find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec sh -c '\''echo "{} : $(find "{}" -type f | wc -l)" file\(s\)'\'' \;'

Note the very tricky handling of nested single quotes. And no, it is not possible to use double quotes for the sh -c argument.

syntaxerror
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16
find . -type f | cut -d"/" -f2 | uniq -c

Lists a folders and files in the current folder with a count of files found beneath. Quick and useful IMO. (files show with count 1).

Thor
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nothx
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2

Using find is definitely the way to go if you want to count recursively, but if you just want a count of the files directly under a certain directory:

ls dir1 | wc -l

jonvuri
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1
find . -mindepth 1 -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'printf "%4d : %s\n" "$(find {} -type f | wc -l)" "{}"'

I need often need to count the number of files in my sub-directories and use this command. I prefer the count to appear first.

Teddy Katayama
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0

You could use this python code. Boot up the interpreter by running python3 and paste this:

folder_path = '.'
import os, glob
for folder in sorted(glob.glob('{}/*'.format(folder_path))):
    print('{:}: {:>8,}'.format(os.path.split(folder)[-1], len(glob.glob('{}/*'.format(folder)))))

Or a recursive version for nested counts:

import os, glob
def nested_count(folder_path, level=0):
    for folder in sorted(glob.glob('{}/'.format(os.path.join(folder_path, '*')))):
        print('{:}{:}: {:,}'.format('    '*level, os.path.split(os.path.split(folder)[-2])[-1], len(glob.glob(os.path.join(folder, '*')))))
        nested_count(folder, level+1)
nested_count('.')

Example output:

>>> figures: 5
>>> misc: 1
>>> notebooks: 5
>>>     archive: 65
>>>     html: 12
>>>     py: 12
>>>     src: 14
>>> reports: 1
>>>     content: 6
>>> src: 1
>>>     html_download: 1
Alex
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0

For reliable methods of counting files in a directory, see this answer of mine: What is a reliable code to count files?

In your case we additionally need to iterate over subdirectories. A for loop is good for this:

for d in */; do
    c="$(cd -- "$d" && find . ! -name . -exec printf a \; | wc -c)"
    if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then c="?"; fi
    printf '%-25s : %s\n' "${d%/}" "$c"
done

Notes:

  • Normally */ does not match directories with names starting with a dot ("hidden" directories). In Bash shopt -s dotglob changes this.

  • ! -name . is responsible for not counting the respective subdirectory itself.

  • ${d%/} removes trailing /. If we used * instead of */ in the for loop, then there would be nothing to remove, but the loop would iterate over non-directories as well.

  • Double dash (--) is useful in case a name starts with -. If we used ./*/ in the for loop, then there would be no need for --, but you probably would want to remove the leading ./ while printing the output, this would complicate the code.

  • In the output ? appears in case of a problem. Failing cd (probably because of insufficient permissions) is the problem I had in mind. find unable to descend to some (sub-…)subdirectory does not qualify as a problem in this context. If you see a number then it means find found as many files there, so there are at least as many files in the directory. If you see ? then it means find most likely didn't run because cd had failed.

  • See the already linked answer, it will help you tailor the find command to your needs (e.g. non-recursive solution, counting files of a specific type, some optimizations).

  • Multi-byte characters in names will confuse printf and the output may appear misaligned.

  • The format that prints names is %-25s, so any name is printed as-is (plus padding). Newline characters, carriage return characters, escape sequences in names may cause results you don't expect. With printf builtin in Bash use %q instead of %s (it will be %-25q in our case) to mitigate the problem.

Kamil Maciorowski
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-1

Output as csv format for Folders :

for f in $(find * -type d); do echo $f,$(ls ./$f | wc -l) ; done

output:

aFolder,30

bFolder,20


cFolder,10
DarkDiamond
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Ronen Tal
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-1

What I use... This makes an array of all the subdirectories in the one you give as a parameter. Print the subdirectory and the count of that same subdirectory until all the subdirectories are processed.

#!/bin/bash    
directories=($(/bin/ls -l $1 | /bin/grep "^d" | /usr/bin/awk -F" " '{print $9}'))

for item in ${directories[*]}
    do
        if [ -d "$1$item" ]; then
            echo "$1$item"
            /bin/ls $1$item | /usr/bin/wc -l
        fi
    done
karel
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derberlinersmurf
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