OK, how do I count files in a directory QUICK!!!

[Eric Cope]

find and wc should work too.
Eric

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net> wrote:

> From: "kitepilot at kitepilot.com" <kitepilot at kitepilot.com>
> > I'll keep it easy: It is a directory that only contains files.
> > So, you'd say: what's wrong with "ls|wc -l" ?
> > There are almost a million files in that directory.
> > This count has to be placed in a loop in a shell script to report a
> > second-to-second delta.
>
> The directory organization is complete pants if there are that many files
> in
> one dir.  Time to split some things up, eh?
>
> > The truth is that find takes some 3 seconds to do the count.
> > What about ls without sorting? That was almost 15 seconds.
>
> That's a bit strange.  I'd think "ls -1U --color=never" would spit
> everything
> out almost as fast as possible, considering.
>
> > Now, directories are files. It would be great if I could "count
> > lines" on that [directory] or somehow interrogate it "how many
> > lines do you have?" without actually hitting the filesystem.
> > I'm considering writing a little C utility to do just that, but...
> > "struct stat" (my first shot) doesn't contain that
>
> #include<dirent.h>
> #include<stdio.h>
>
> int main(int argc, char **argv)
> {
>
> DIR *dirp;
> struct dirent *entry;
> int count=0;
>
> if(argc != 2){
>   printf("usage: checkdir <directory to check>\n");
>   exit(1);
>   }
>
> dirp=opendir(argv[1]);
> if(dirp==NULL){
>   printf("couldn't open %s\n",argv[1]);
>   exit(1);
>   }
> while((entry=readdir(dirp))!=NULL){
>   count++;
>   }
> printf("%d files in %s\n",count,argv[1]);
> exit(0);
>
> }
>
> ...this counts all files; all dirs have at least 2 entries in them, . and
> .. ,
> so subtract 2 or do count-=2 or whatever.  Note that this does no filetype
> checking at all and checking of errors is minimal.  I can't see how to do
> what
> you want any faster without going below glibc, which is pretty hairy.
>
> Also, see if you can rearrange the dir structure.  Having a million files
> in
> one dir can cause silliness.  HTH,
>
>
> --
> Matt G / Dances With Crows
> The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
> There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
>
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