Count the Lines of all files in Directory Ubuntu

When you are running low on disk space, you can free up some space by finding out how many files are in a specific directory, thereby determining which directories occupy most disk space.

This guide will focus on using various commands and techniques to determine the number of files in a specific directory.

Wc command

The simplest method to calculate the number of files in a directory is to use the wc command. For example, using find and wc, we can get the total number of files as shown in the command below:

The command above will recursively find the files in a specific directory. To include the directories, use the ls command and pass the output to wc.

NOTE: Using ls without arguments might result in a different value as wc counts the number of lines printed out.

The tree command

Another tool we can use to get the number of files in a directory is the tree command. A tree is a simple utility that shows the files and directories in forest format.

To install the tree on Debian systems, use the command:

To count the number of files in a specific directory with a tree, use the command:

As seen, a tree shows both the total number of files and directories.

To show hidden files, use the -a option to include all the files:

Nautilus

You can also use the Graphical interface to show the number of files in a directory. This method may give different results depending on the file manager you are using.

In Ubuntu, navigate to the target directory, right-click, and select properties. In the contents section, you will see the total number of files and directories. For example:

Conclusion

In this quick tutorial, we discussed how to count the number of files in a specific directory in Linux using the wc command, tree, and the graphical interface.