2 min read

Tally up all the files recursively through directories

2016-09-17

Every now and then there may arise a need of asking “How many files do I have under certain folders”?

First thing first, expression upfront:

find * -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r dir;
do
        printf "%s:\t" "$dir";
        find "$dir" -type f | wc -l
done

Here’s how it works: to break things up, commands used here include

  • find is a useful command for searching files/folders.
    • -maxdepth 1 will search subdirectories only one level down;
    • -type d looks for directories, and -type f looks for files;
  • A while loop that ends when the condition is met, in this case, reaching the end of dir variable.
  • read is a command that can read a single line from standard input, then splitting the input into words can may be used by other commands.
    • -r deactivates the unexpected behavior of breaking up long lines with a trailing backslash character (see here).
  • printf outputs string of texts defined by user.
    • %s is a specifier that outputs the entire argument in literal form;
    • \t is a specifier to print out TAB and add some spacing;
    • Adding quotation marks is considered more robust, considering that some folder names may contain spaces that may confuse the execution.
  • wc -l returns the counts

Try it yourself to see how the outputs look like, maybe tweak a little to make it work for your case, and put in a function so that you don’t have to code it up every time!