Fast Linux file count for a large number of files

Question

I\'m trying to figure out the best way to find the number of files in a particular directory when there are a very large number of files (more than 100,000).

When the

Answer 1

find, ls, and perl tested against 40,000 files has the same speed (though I didn't try to clear the cache):

[user@server logs]$ time find . | wc -l
42917

real    0m0.054s
user    0m0.018s
sys     0m0.040s

[user@server logs]$ time /bin/ls -f | wc -l
42918

real    0m0.059s
user    0m0.027s
sys     0m0.037s

And with Perl's opendir and readdir, the same time:

[user@server logs]$ time perl -e 'opendir D, "."; @files = readdir D; closedir D; print scalar(@files)."\n"'
42918

real    0m0.057s
user    0m0.024s
sys     0m0.033s

Note: I used /bin/ls -f to make sure to bypass the alias option which might slow a little bit and -f to avoid file ordering. ls without -f is twice slower than find/perl except if ls is used with -f, it seems to be the same time:

[user@server logs]$ time /bin/ls . | wc -l
42916

real    0m0.109s
user    0m0.070s
sys     0m0.044s

I also would like to have some script to ask the file system directly without all the unnecessary information.

_{The tests were based on the answers of Peter van der Heijden, glenn jackman, and mark4o.}