How to count files in a directory

Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. See readdir. If you do not care about current directory. If you want to include subdirectories as well, you can use this function that I'm using in some of my code.

You should probably modify it to include some more error checking and support different directory separators. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Counting the number of files in a directory using C Ask Question. Asked 12 years, 6 months ago. Active 2 years, 5 months ago. If you want to count the number of files and directories in all the subdirectories, you can use the tree command.

This command shows the directory structure and then displays the summary at the bottom of the output. As you can see in the output, it shows that there are 7 directories and 20 files in total. So far, all the solutions we have seen for counting the number of files, also take directories into account. Directories are essentially files but what if you want to count only the number of files, not directories? You can use the wonderful find command. The above command searched for all the files type f in current directory and its subdirectories.

But what if you want to count the number of files in the current directory only excluding the files in the subdirectories? You can use the same command as above but with a slight difference. In Linux, you can have multiple ways to achieve the same goal. I am pretty sure there can be several other methods to count the number of files in Linux. If you use some other command, why not share it with us?

Please enter at least 3 characters 0 results found. You can also add the grep command to find a more exact count of the files you want to count, as shown below. In the example above, the command only counts files that begin with the letter "a". Linux users macOS users. Notice If hidden files are not shown, these files are not counted. Notice If any file or folder is highlighted, only the selected items are counted. Tip Use the search box in the top-right corner of the window to search for a specific type of file.

Feel free to leave a question or suggestion in the comment section. Please enter at least 3 characters 0 results found. Abhishek Prakash. Here are several ways to count the number of files in a given directory in Linux. Table of Contents. How do you know how many files are there is a directory? Method 1: Use ls and wc command for counting number of lines in directory The simplest and the most obvious option is to use the wc command for counting number of files.

Listing the contents of a directory is easy. But what if you want to list only the directories, not files and links? Linux Handbook Abhishek Prakash.