What is the best way to count “find” results?

Question

My current solution would be find -exec printf \'.\' \\; | wc -c, but this takes far too long when there are more than 10000 results. Is there no f

Answer 1

This solution is certainly slower than some of the other find -> wc solutions here, but if you were inclined to do something else with the file names in addition to counting them, you could read from the find output.

n=0
while read -r -d ''; do
    ((n++)) # count
    # maybe perform another act on file
done < <(find  -print0)
echo $n

It is just a modification of a solution found in BashGuide that properly handles files with nonstandard names by making the find output delimiter a NUL byte using print0, and reading from it using '' (NUL byte) as the loop delimiter.