How to find the number of files on a filesystem

disk-usagefilesystemsinode

I want to know how many files I have on my filesystem. I know I can do something like this:

find / -type f | wc -l

This seems highly inefficient. What I'd really like is to do is find the total number of unique inodes that are considered a 'file'.

Is there a better way?

Note:

I would like to do this because I am developing a file synchronization program, and I would like to do some statistical analysis (like how many files the average user has total vs how many files are on the system). I don't, however, need to know anything about those files, just that they exist (paths don't matter at all). I would especially like to know this info for each mounted filesystem (and it's associated mount point).

Best Answer

The --inodes option to df will tell you how many inodes are reserved for use. For example:

$ df --inodes / /home
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            3981312  641704 3339608   17% /
/dev/sda8            30588928  332207 30256721    2% /home
$ sudo find / -xdev -print | wc -l
642070
$ sudo find /home -print | wc -l
332158
$ sudo find /home -type f -print | wc -l
284204

Notice that the number of entries returned from find is greater than IUsed for the root (/) filesystem, but is less for /home. But both are within 0.0005%. The reason for the discrepancies is because of hard links and similar situations.

Remember that directories, symlinks, UNIX domain sockets and named pipes are all 'files' as it relates to the filesystem. So using find -type f flag is wildly inaccurate, from a statistical viewpoint.

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How to count all the files recursively through directories

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

Thanks to Gilles and xenoterracide for safety/compatibility fixes.

The first part: find . -maxdepth 1 -type d will return a list of all directories in the current working directory. (Warning: -maxdepth is a GNU extension and might not be present in non-GNU versions of find.) This is piped to...

The second part: while read -r dir; do (shown above as while read -r dir(newline)do) begins a while loop – as long as the pipe coming into the while is open (which is until the entire list of directories is sent), the read command will place the next line into the variable dir. Then it continues...

The third part: printf "%s:\t" "$dir" will print the string in $dir (which is holding one of the directory names) followed by a colon and a tab (but not a newline).

The fourth part: find "$dir" -type f makes a list of all the files inside the directory whose name is held in $dir. This list is sent to...

The fifth part: wc -l counts the number of lines that are sent into its standard input.

The final part: done simply ends the while loop.

So we get a list of all the directories in the current directory. For each of those directories, we generate a list of all the files in it so that we can count them all using wc -l. The result will look like:

./dir1: 234
./dir2: 11
./dir3: 2199
...

Best Answer

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How to count all the files recursively through directories

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