counting number of directories in a specific directory - linux

Question

How to count the number of folders in a specific directory. I am using the following command, but it always provides an extra one.
find /directory/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -print| wc -l
For example, if I have 3 folders, this command provides 4. If it contains 5 folders, the command provides 6. Why is that?

Answer 1

find is also printing the directory itself:
$ find .vim/ -maxdepth 1 -type d
.vim/
.vim/indent
.vim/colors
.vim/doc
.vim/after
.vim/autoload
.vim/compiler
.vim/plugin
.vim/syntax
.vim/ftplugin
.vim/bundle
.vim/ftdetect
You can instead test the directory's children and do not descend into them at all:
$ find .vim/* -maxdepth 0 -type d
.vim/after
.vim/autoload
.vim/bundle
.vim/colors
.vim/compiler
.vim/doc
.vim/ftdetect
.vim/ftplugin
.vim/indent
.vim/plugin
.vim/syntax
$ find .vim/* -maxdepth 0 -type d | wc -l
11
$ find .vim/ -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l
12
You can also use ls:
$ ls -l .vim | grep -c ^d
11
$ ls -l .vim
total 52
drwxrwxr-x 3 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 after
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 autoload
drwxrwxr-x 13 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 bundle
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 colors
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 compiler
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 doc
-rw-rw-r-- 1 anossovp anossovp 48 Aug 29 2012 filetype.vim
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 ftdetect
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 ftplugin
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 indent
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 plugin
-rw-rw-r-- 1 anossovp anossovp 2505 Aug 29 2012 README.rst
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 syntax
$ ls -l .vim | grep ^d
drwxrwxr-x 3 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 after
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 autoload
drwxrwxr-x 13 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 bundle
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 colors
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 compiler
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 doc
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 ftdetect
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 ftplugin
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 indent
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 plugin
drwxrwxr-x 2 anossovp anossovp 4096 Aug 29 2012 syntax

Answer 2

Get a count of only the directories in the current directory
echo */ | wc
you will get out put like 1 309 4594
2nd digit represents no. of directories.
or
tree -L 1 | tail -1

Answer 3

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l
For find -mindepth means total number recusive in directories
-maxdepth means total number recusive in directories
-type d means directory
And for wc -l means count the lines of the input

Answer 4

If you only have directories in the folder and no files this does it:
ls | wc -l

Answer 5

Run stat -c %h folder and subtract 2 from the result. This employs only a single subprocess as opposed to the 2 (or even 3) required by most of the other solutions here (typically find or ls plus wc).
Using sh/bash:
echo $((`stat -c %h folder` - 2))   # 'echo' is a shell builtin
Using csh/tcsh:
# cnt = `stat -c %h folder` - 2; echo $cnt   # 'echo' is a shell builtin
Explanation: stat -c %h folder prints the number of hardlinks to folder, and each subfolder under folder contains a ../ entry which is a hardlink back to folder. You must subtract 2 because there are two additional hardlinks in the count:
folder's own self-referential ./ entry, and
folder's parent's link to folder

Answer 6

Best way to navigate to your drive and simply execute
ls -lR | grep ^d | wc -l
and to Find all folders in total, including subdirectories?
find /mount/point -type d | wc -l
...or find all folders in the root directory (not including subdirectories)?
find /mount/point -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l
Cheers!

Answer 7

I think the easiest is
ls -ld images/* | wc -l
where images is your target directory. The -d flag limits to directories, and the -l flag will perform a per-line listing, compatible with the very familiar wc -l for line count.

Answer 8

No of directory we can find using below command
ls -l | grep "^d" | wc -l

Answer 9

Some useful examples:
count files in current dir
/bin/ls -lA | egrep -c '^-'
count dirs in current dir
/bin/ls -lA | egrep -c '^d'
count files and dirs in current dir
/bin/ls -lA | egrep -c '^-|^d'
count files and dirs in in one subdirectory
/bin/ls -lA subdir_name/ | egrep -c '^-|^d'
I have noticed a strange thing (at least in my case) :
When I have tried with ls instead /bin/ls
the -A parameter do not list implied . and .. NOT WORK as espected. When I use
ls that show ./ and ../ So that result wrong count. SOLUTION : /bin/ls instead ls

Answer 10

To get the number of directories - navigate
go to the directory and execute
ls -l | grep -c ^d

Answer 11

A pure bash solution:
shopt -s nullglob
dirs=( /path/to/directory/*/ )
echo "There are ${#dirs[#]} (non-hidden) directories"
If you also want to count the hidden directories:
shopt -s nullglob dotglob
dirs=( /path/to/directory/*/ )
echo "There are ${#dirs[#]} directories (including hidden ones)"
Note that this will also count links to directories. If you don't want that, it's a bit more difficult with this method.
Using find:
find /path/to/directory -type d \! -name . -prune -exec printf x \; | wc -c
The trick is to output an x to stdout each time a directory is found, and then use wc to count the number of characters. This will count the number of all directories (including hidden ones), excluding links.
The methods presented here are all safe wrt to funny characters that can appear in file names (spaces, newlines, glob characters, etc.).

Answer 12

Using zsh:
a=(*(/N)); echo ${#a}
The N is a nullglob, / makes it match directories, # counts. It will neatly cope with spaces in directory names as well as returning 0 if there are no directories.

Answer 13

The best answer to what you want is
echo `find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l`-1 | bc
this subtracts one to remove the unwanted '.' directory that find lists (as patel deven mentioned above).
If you want to count subfolders recursively, then just leave off the maxdepth option, so
echo `find . -type d | wc -l`-1 | bc
PS If you find command substitution ugly, subtracting one can be done as a pure stream using sed and bc.
Subtracting one from count:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l | sed 's/$/-1\n/' | bc
or, adding count to minus one:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l | sed 's/^/-1+/' | bc

Answer 14

Count all files and subfolders, windows style:
dir=/YOUR/PATH;f=$(find $dir -type f | wc -l); d=$(find $dir -mindepth 1 -type d | wc -l); echo "$f Files, $d Folders"

Answer 15

If you want to use regular expressions, then try:
ls -c | grep "^d" | wc -l

Answer 16

If you want to count folders that have similar names like folder01,folder02,folder03, etc then you can do
ls -l | grep ^d | grep -c folder

Answer 17

Best way to do it:
ls -la | grep -v total | wc -l
This gives you the perfect count.