LinuxQuestions.org - List total number of directories

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List total number of directories

Hi!

Could someone tell me how to list the total number of directories I would have for instance in my home directory?

Thank you in advance

Code:

find -type d | wc -l

Terve ToniT!

Thank you for your quick reply. I have tried find -type d | wc -l and got the number 11 but when I do a ls -F to verify how many directories I have, I only see two directories. How it comes that the command find -type d | wc -l gives me 11 ?

Regards

Oups! sorry I didn't notice the subdirectories. So I have not 2 directories but 12 and when I do the command find -type d | wc -l the output is 13. So it's counting also the directory I am currently in. Is there a way to ignore this directory ?

Regards

Code:

find -type d | wc -l | awk '{print $1-1}'

;)

You can try those commands separatedly.

Find is used to find files or directories. Argument "-type d" limits search to only diretories.
Typing just

Code:

find -type d

gives you a listing of those directories.
wc is an acronym from word count. It is used to count bytes, words or lines.
Parameter "-l" means to show only number of lines in the input (which was this case the output of previous command). You can test this eg. by writing

Code:

wc

, typing something and hitting ctrl-d (means end of buffer) at the end and examine the output.

Other ways to test it is like

Code:

cat /etc/inittab | wc

(cat is used to type files to output[generally screen, in this case as input to wc]).
The last command is awk, a small programming language called with a command '{print $1-1}', which means that for every line in the input, print the first field(a section in the line separated by space or enter) minus one.

You can test this by writing

Code:

awk '{print $1-1}'

and typing some numbers. (hit ctrl-d to end)

You might want to also try commands

Code:

man find

Code:

man wc

and

Code:

man awk

.

Also typing

Code:

info coreutils

gives you a good overview of the toolbox that
is available to the shell.

Thanks a lot ToniT!

That was a great and well explained tutorial ! it’s uncredible how powerful shell commands can be.