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 is my countfiles function in my ~/.bashrc (it's reasonably fast, should work for Linux & FreeBSD find, and does not get fooled by file paths containing newline characters; the final wc just counts NUL bytes):

countfiles () 
{ 
   command find "${1:-.}" -type f -name "${2:-*}" -print0 | 
       command tr -dc '\0' | command wc -c;
return 0
}

countfiles

countfiles ~ '*.txt'