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 get a count of files and directories with the tree program.

Run the command tree | tail -n 1 to get the last line, which will say something like "763 directories, 9290 files". This counts files and folders recursively, excluding hidden files, which can be added with the flag -a. For reference, it took 4.8 seconds on my computer, for tree to count my whole home directory, which was 24,777 directories, 238,680 files. find -type f | wc -l took 5.3 seconds, half a second longer, so I think tree is pretty competitive speed-wise.

As long as you don't have any subfolders, tree is a quick and easy way to count the files.

Also, and purely for the fun of it, you can use tree | grep '^├' to only show the files/folders in the current directory - this is basically a much slower version of ls.