counting number of directories in a specific directory

Question

How to count the number of folders in a specific directory. I am using the following command, but it always provides an extra one.

find /directory/ -maxdept         


        

Answer 1

A pure bash solution:

shopt -s nullglob
dirs=( /path/to/directory/*/ )
echo "There are ${#dirs[@]} (non-hidden) directories"

If you also want to count the hidden directories:

shopt -s nullglob dotglob
dirs=( /path/to/directory/*/ )
echo "There are ${#dirs[@]} directories (including hidden ones)"

Note that this will also count links to directories. If you don't want that, it's a bit more difficult with this method.

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Using find:

find /path/to/directory -type d \! -name . -prune -exec printf x \; | wc -c

The trick is to output an x to stdout each time a directory is found, and then use wc to count the number of characters. This will count the number of all directories (including hidden ones), excluding links.

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The methods presented here are all safe wrt to funny characters that can appear in file names (spaces, newlines, glob characters, etc.).