How much files in directory

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How many files can you put in a Windows folder without a noticable performance degradation? Ask Question. Asked 12 years, 4 months ago. Active 8 months ago. Viewed 36k times. Improve this question. HopelessN00b 1, 3 3 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 29 29 bronze badges. Mark Ransom Mark Ransom 2, 2 2 gold badges 20 20 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. In my testing here on Win 7 Explorer is actually faster than some other tools that allegedly are more efficient. I haven't played with Win 7 yet, but mainly for lack of time and a good machine. I'm glad they appear to have invested some time in improving Explorer then. Joey Joey Just wait until you start doing that over a network. A couple apps I have to maintain like to archive everything in the same place: , or more files.

Don't even think about opening that folder in explorer. Ok, agreed there. JoelCoehoorn: SMBv2 worked wonders on our machines. FerranB FerranB 1, 1 1 gold badge 15 15 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges. Gabriel Gabriel 61 2 2 bronze badges. Parsing the output of ls always makes me uneasy, but here it should work as long as your file names don't contain newlines, or your ls escapes them.

Any of those solutions that rely on passing the expansion of a glob to ls may fail with a argument list too long error if there are a lot of matching files. The option -L is used for specifying the maximum display level of the directory tree. The tree command does not only count the number of files, but also the number of directories, considering as many levels of the directory tree as you like. Here's another technique along the lines of the one Gilles posted :. On Linux, to make the command very robust and handle files that might have newlines in their name, use this:.

This saves us from the ordeal of parsing ls output. It's worthy to notice the use of some loved commands like tail and cut. Also, note that tree is not available by default. The command above first capture information about the directory at level 1, then get the last line tail -n 1 where our goal is, and end up with cut to take the third word.

If you have rights to install packages, there is a very simple tool to do this and more. It is called ncdu and it can be installed using apt or yum. A basic usage of ncdu would be:.

This will display an ncurses-based screen which you can navigate using cursor keys. At the bottom, initially you will see the total number of files in that directory and subdirectories. A bonus of ncdu is that it gives a progress bar while scanning. You can also redirect the output to a file for later use. In the man page, there is an interesting section on how hard links are handled across various versions of ncdu.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How can I get a count of files in a directory using the command line?

Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 2 months ago. Active 2 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Blake Blake 3, 2 2 gold badges 14 14 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Using a broad definition of "file" ls wc -l note that it doesn't count hidden files and assumes that file names don't contain newline characters. Improve this answer. James James 3, 1 1 gold badge 14 14 silver badges 4 4 bronze badges. The -l switch causes it to count lines.

In this case, it's counting the lines in the output from ls. This is the always the way I was taught to get a file count for a given directory, too. An empty directory will still return 1 line. We care about security of your data. Privacy Policy. Native Auditing. Click "View Report". Learn a Quick and Easy Way to Count Files in a Folder with PowerShell or Netwrix Auditor During your day-to-day tasks, you may need to count the files in a folder on a Windows server or provide full statistics on how many files a folder or contains.