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

With bash:

Create an array of entries with ( ) and get the count with #.

FILES=(./*); echo ${#FILES[@]}

Ok that doesn't recursively count files but I wanted to show the simple option first. A common use case might be for creating rollover backups of a file. This will create logfile.1, logfile.2, logfile.3 etc.

CNT=(./logfile*); mv logfile logfile.${#CNT[@]}

Recursive count with bash 4+ globstar enabled (as mentioned by @tripleee)

FILES=(**/*); echo ${#FILES[@]}

To get the count of files recursively we can still use find in the same way.

FILES=(`find . -type f`); echo ${#FILES[@]}