Directory depth
Directory depth is supported by the find command. The depth of the directory controls how far locate will search for files.
There are two kinds of support directory depths.
- maxdepth: The maximum level will be found. The value of maxdepth will be an integer that is not negative.
- mindepth: The minimal depth at which find can function on a directory. The value of mindepth will be an integer that is not negative.
Let us examine these values in action. The structure of the find command would be as follows.
find <directory> -maxdepth <maxdepth_value> | wc -l
find <directory> -mindepth <mindepth_value> | 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.