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# 1  
Old 11-15-2010
Counting files in a given directory
Hi all,

Need some help counting files... Smilie

I'm trying to count the number of files in a given directory (and subdirectories) which reportedly contains "thousands" of files.

I'm using this:

Code:
ls -R | wc -l

However it's been an hour and looks like it's still running; there is no output at all.

Is there a faster/better way to count the exact number of files or get an approximate value?

Thanks.
# 2  
Old 11-15-2010
Try:
Code:
find * -type f |wc -l

# 3  
Old 11-15-2010
Ok, I cancelled the "ls" and ran a "find"... now it's been almost four hours and the command is still running. Smilie

Guess I'm out of luck.
# 4  
Old 11-16-2010
I ran find command on my entire root (/) which finished in less then 2 minutes. In my case having more then 600K files
Code:
[root@aaa-build ~]# date
Tue Nov 16 10:01:22 IST 2010
[root@aaa-build ~]# time find / -type f | wc -l
662226

real    1m23.387s
user    0m1.149s
sys     0m6.536s


I'd adise you to run "find ${LOCATION} -type f | wc -l"
Last edited by Franklin52; 11-16-2010 at 09:02 AM.. Reason: Please use code tags, thank you
# 5  
Old 11-16-2010
Well, I tried with 'find' yesterday and left it running for about 7 hours and it never finished. Smilie

Apparently it's not just "thousands" of files, but several millions.

I'm still trying to figure out how to count those files. It would be enough for me if I could find out an approximate value, and not the exact number.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

---------- Post updated at 10:33 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:12 AM ----------

Now I'm wondering, would the used inodes in the filesystem provide an approximate value of the total number of files? This is the output of df:

Code:
[root@atlas ~]# df -i
Filesystem            		Inodes   IUsed   IFree		IUse% 	Mounted on
/dev/mapper/volAvg-A1lv		15466496 4455023 11011473	30%	/export

# 6  
Old 11-16-2010
Anything that counts files will have to do so the same way: checking directory entries. So there's no special "faster ls". (If there was, why wouldn't we use it for everything?)

If you can compile on this machine, this program can provide a running total, updated once a second:

Code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

int lines=0;

int main(void)
{
	time_t timer=time(NULL);
	char buf[16384];
	while(fgets(buf, 16384, stdin) != NULL)
	{
		lines++;

		if((time(NULL)-timer) > 1)
		{
			fprintf(stderr, "\r%d", lines);
			timer=time(NULL);
		}
	}

	printf("%d\n", lines);

	return(0);
}

It only reads from stdin.

---------- Post updated at 10:30 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:26 AM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by verdepollo
I'm still trying to figure out how to count those files. It would be enough for me if I could find out an approximate value, and not the exact number.
Very approximate since it includes directory entries as well, but since counting 4 million files is going to be hard, it might have to do.
This User Gave Thanks to Corona688 For This Post:
verdepollo
# 7  
Old 11-16-2010
I compiled your code; somehow the counter is increasing really slowly (~200 files/min).

I think I can assume there are around ~4 million files. Hopefully this approximation will work fine for my process.

Thanks all for your help. Smilie
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