Recursively counting files in a Linux directory

Question

How can I recursively count files in a Linux directory?

I found this:

find DIR_NAME -type f ¦ wc -l

But when I run this it returns

Answer 1

On my computer, rsync is a little bit faster than find | wc -l in the accepted answer:

$ rsync --stats --dry-run -ax /path/to/dir /tmp

Number of files: 173076
Number of files transferred: 150481
Total file size: 8414946241 bytes
Total transferred file size: 8414932602 bytes

The second line has the number of files, 150,481 in the above example. As a bonus you get the total size as well (in bytes).

Remarks:

• the first line is a count of files, directories, symlinks, etc all together, that's why it is bigger than the second line.
• the --dry-run (or -n for short) option is important to not actually transfer the files!
• I used the -x option to "don't cross filesystem boundaries", which means if you execute it for / and you have external hard disks attached, it will only count the files on the root partition.