Linux

47951 readers

1832 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Looking for a tool to visualize folders based on number of files. (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are plenty of utilities (GUI, such as filelight and TUI, such as dua as well) for analyzing disk usage by space, but I would like to view my folders based on the count of files, as I'm making backups, and folders with lots of small files (e.g. node_modules) take very long to move around, so I guess that I'd be better of compressing those into a single file before archiving, as it's already highly unlikely that I'll need to access them anyway. Thanks for any pointers in advance!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The find command could be your friend for getting a full depth count. Something like:

find /path/name/here/ | wc -l

Or just:

find . | wc -l

for the current directory.

There's also a command called locate (often with another letter in front, but accessible by just that word) which maintains a database of filenames on a system that can be used, provided it's installed and has built that database.

Pro: Faster than churning the disk every time with find. (Though disk cache can help alleviate some of this).

Cons: Can get out of date with a changing filesystem. Harder to search for relative paths like .

locate -r '^/path/name/here/' | wc -l

... would be roughly equivalent to the first find example.