Linux Counting Files in Directory

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Counting the files in a directory.

When I was doing my summer project, I downloaded the datasets into the server and unzipped the zip file. Since it has a large amount of files in the dir, I want to count the number of files just through the terminal.

First try

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ls -1 | wc -l

Use this command after getting into the dir, it can count the number of files in the current dir. Note: the first 1 is ONE, and the second l is the l for large.

Result: it seems that I can’t perform well, since the speed is slow and need to spend a lot of time to get the result( I didn’t wait for that long to get the final result).

Note:

wc is great when I search this command.

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wc -l < file.txt
wc -w file2.txt

The first line of code can count the number of lines in a text file.

The second line of code can count the words in the text file.

Improvement to get my result

Since I have the nohup.out, I can count the line number to know how many files I have uncompressed.

The uncompressing process is a really long journey…for my project

Reference

  1. Bash Prompt HOWTO: Counting Files in the Current Directory