How to count files (get the number of files) under a directory in Linux?

by Yang Yang on November 18, 2008

Just perform this command under the directory:

find . -type f | wc -l

and you will get the total number of files under it. Simply copy and paste that to do the trick.

This should also work on all *nix OS.

{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

Hans November 23, 2008 at 6:11 pm

I will try this command later when I switched to Linux. I am still in exploration stage in Ubuntu and I am having difficulty every now and then that is why I tend to go back to Windows when I am rushing up something.

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Yang Yang December 8, 2008 at 8:09 pm

@Hans

While many agree that learning new things is exciting, refreshing and often bringing new perspectives, it’s in nature a cost.

Every new approach comes with a cost, to adopt it or not is the question of cost-effectiveness.

Jackson Matthews December 15, 2008 at 2:11 am

I am going to switch to linux in a few days, most likely sometime before Christmas! I will surely have to save this code somewhere. This will make life much easier. Thanks for the quick tip!

Thank You,

Mike December 15, 2008 at 11:27 pm

Nice tip. Could you use something like this:

ls | wc -l

as well?

Chris January 6, 2009 at 11:36 am

Unfortunately this wont work on directories with a lot of files in them; you’ll get the “Argument list too long” error…

Yang Yang January 6, 2009 at 1:27 pm

@Chris
I used it under a directory with around 18,000 gif images and it didn’t show up the error. What’s the rough number of files you have?

Ravindra May 27, 2009 at 5:48 pm

ls -l . | egrep -c ‘^-’

Alex Carter July 9, 2009 at 8:05 pm

Thank you for this tip. At some point I also needed to count files in all subdirectories as well, so I found this solution, may be it will be useful for somebody else:

ls -laR | wc -l