How to list & sort directories by number of items they contain?

Mountain · 04-26-2009, 06:42 PM

I need something similar to this:

Code:

du --max-depth=1 /home/ | sort -n -r

But I want to check for the total number of items in each directory rather than the size.

choogendyk · 04-26-2009, 08:09 PM

If you do an `ls -l` the second item is the number of links to a file or directory. For a directory that would include all the items contained in it, since they link back to it. So it is a reasonable approximation.

$ ls -l /home/ | grep '^d' | sort -n -r -k 2

the second command in the pipe sequence just eliminates everything that is not a directory.

Mountain · 04-26-2009, 08:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by choogendyk

If you do an `ls -l` the second item is the number of links to a file or directory. For a directory that would include all the items contained in it, since they link back to it. So it is a reasonable approximation.

$ ls -l /home/ | grep '^d' | sort -n -r -k 2

the second command in the pipe sequence just eliminates everything that is not a directory.

I need something that is recursive. Any ideas for that? Thanks.

(I mean for each subdirectory 1 level down, I would like to see a value for all items it contains including all subdirectories in it, recursively.)

choogendyk · 04-27-2009, 07:34 AM

I can't think of a simple command line that would do it.

find can tell you what is in one directory recursively, so

$ find /home/particular-one -type f | wc -l

will tell you how many files are in that particular-one. Starting from that idea, you could script something. Have the output go to a file and include the directory name. Then cat the file to sort and output that. So, something like

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
for DIR in `ls /home/`
do
  echo "`find $DIR -type f | wc -l` $DIR" >> temp-file
done
cat temp-file | sort -n -r

colucix · 04-27-2009, 07:58 AM

You can try also the action -exec of find, using the command "sh -c" to manage the pipe and printf to specify the output format:

Code:

find /home -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec sh -c 'ls {} | printf "%5s\t%s\n" $(wc -l) {}' \; | sort -nr

ghostdog74 · 04-27-2009, 08:10 AM

if you have Python, you can use os.walk

Code:

for root, d ,files in os.walk("/home"):
    print "root: ",root ,"number of items: ", len(root)
    print "d: ",d ,"number of directories: ", len(d)
    print "files: ",files ,"number of items: ", len(files)