Count files using wc
On Linux, the ls command, piped with the wc -l command, is the simplest way to count files in a directory.
ls | wc -l
The wc command is used in Linux to output the number of bytes, characters, or newlines. In this situation, though, we are using this command to count the number of files in a directory.
Assume you wish to count the number of files in the /etc directory.
To do this, run the “ls” command on the “/etc” directory and pipe it into the “wc” command.
ls /etc | wc -l
How to Count Files in Directory Recursively in Linux
When exploring directories on your server, you may have come across folders with a large number of files in them. You might wish to know how many files exist in a certain directory or across many directories at times. To put it another way, you wish to count the number of files saved in a directory on your system. In this article, we are going to see how you can easily count files in a directory on Linux.
There are 7 different methods for Counting Files in Directory Recursively in Linux:
- Method 1: Count files using wc
- Method 2: Basic file counting
- Method 3: Count files recursively using the find command
- Method 4: Counting with directories
- Method 5: Directory depth
- Method 6: Counting hidden files with the tree command
- Method 7: Counting files using GUI
Let’s go through all the methods one by one.