He needed a tool that could search for phrases and strings within text files. McMahon was trying to identify the authors of the Federalist papers through textual analysis. His department head at Bell Labs, Doug Mcilroy, approached Thompson and described the problem one of his colleagues, Lee McMahon, was facing. Ken Thompson had extracted the regular expression search capabilities from the ed editor ( pronounced ee-dee) and created a little program - for his own use - to search through text files. The first two are bang on the third is slightly off. Thirdly, it was written overnight to satisfy a particular need. Secondly, the wealth of options can be overwhelming. The grep command is famous in Linux and Unix circles for three reasons. It also works with piped output from other commands. We have discussed three different methods to count files in a directory which include the ls, find and tree commands.The Linux grep command is a string and pattern matching utility that displays matching lines from multiple files. That’s all! In this post, we have gone through how to count files in a directory and its subdirectories on Linux OS. To include the hidden files too, use the -a flag with the tree command as follows: $ tree -a | tail -1 In the output, you will find the count of files and directories under the specified directory. To count the files and directories under a specific directory, use the command below: $ tree | tail -1 The tree command also tells you the count of files and subdirectories under a directory. To count the hidden files too, use the command below: $ ls -Ap | grep -v / | grep '^.' | wc -l To exclude subdirectories and count only the files in a directory, use the command below: $ ls -p | grep -v / | wc -l Here note that this count will not be recursive as it will not count the files under the subdirectories. So in the output, you will get the number of files including the subdirectories under the specified directory. The ls command will list the files in the specified directory while the wc command will count the number of files. Now to count the number of files in the ‘Documents’ directory, the command would be: $ ls -a | wc -l Here is the output of the ls command in our ‘Documents’ directory. If you do not specify the directory path, it will count files in the current working directory, To find the number of files in a directory, pass its output to the wc command as follows: $ ls | wc -l However, note that this count does not include the files inside the subdirectories. Using the ls with the wc command, we can get the count of files in a specific directory. The ls command in Linux is used for listing files and directories. The ‘-mindepth 2’ will tell the find command to go 2 levels down before starting the search. For instance, if you want to exclude the first 2 directories from the file count, you can use the command line option ‘-mindepth 2’. Similarly, you can also start the count from a specific level. This command will count the files up to 3 levels with the top level being the ‘Documents’ directory. Now, for instance, if you want to count the files in a specific directory up to 3 levels (up to ‘mydocs’ directory), use the command line option ‘-maxdepth 3’: $ find -maxdepth 3 -type f| wc -l Below is the directory tree of our Documents directory. The find command also enables you to confine your search to specific directory levels. To include both the files and the subdirectories in the count, use the command below: $ find | wc -l To count only the subdirectories within a directory, use – type d as follows: $ find -type d | wc -l Similarly, to count only the files in the ‘Documents’ directory, the command would be: $ find ~/Documents -type f | wc -l Here is the syntax to count only the files in a directory recursively: $ find -type f | wc -lįor instance, to count all the files in the current directory, the command would be: $ find -type f | wc -l This way you can get the count of files in a directory recursively. The find command finds and lists all the files in a directory and its subdirectories and then the wc command counts the number of files. The find command combined with the wc command can help you count the files recursively. Therefore in this post, we will look at some other quick methods to count files in a directory and its subdirectories in a Linux OS. As manual counting is not a practical solution in this case.

Sometimes you need to find the number of files in those directories and their subdirectories in a Linux system. While navigating your Linux file system, you may come across directories containing a lot of files.

Ls grep count