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

Surprisingly for me, a bare-bones find is very much comparable to ls -f

> time ls -f my_dir | wc -l
17626

real    0m0.015s
user    0m0.011s
sys     0m0.009s

versus

> time find my_dir -maxdepth 1 | wc -l
17625

real    0m0.014s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m0.010s

Of course, the values on the third decimal place shift around a bit every time you execute any of these, so they're basically identical. Notice however that find returns one extra unit, because it counts the actual directory itself (and, as mentioned before, ls -f returns two extra units, since it also counts . and ..).