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

Combining several of the answers here together, the most useful solution seems to be:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 |
xargs -0 -I {} sh -c 'echo -e $(find "{}" -printf "\n" | wc -l) "{}"' |
sort -n

It can handle odd things like file names that include spaces parenthesis and even new lines. It also sorts the output by the number of files.

You can increase the number after -maxdepth to get sub directories counted too. Keep in mind that this can potentially take a long time, particularly if you have a highly nested directory structure in combination with a high -maxdepth number.