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

You can change the output based on your requirements, but here is a Bash one-liner I wrote to recursively count and report the number of files in a series of numerically named directories.

dir=/tmp/count_these/ ; for i in $(ls -1 ${dir} | sort -n) ; { echo "$i => $(find ${dir}${i} -type f | wc -l),"; }

This looks recursively for all files (not directories) in the given directory and returns the results in a hash-like format. Simple tweaks to the find command could make what kind of files you're looking to count more specific, etc.

It results in something like this:

1 => 38,
65 => 95052,
66 => 12823,
67 => 10572,
69 => 67275,
70 => 8105,
71 => 42052,
72 => 1184,