Count the number of files in a directory (Windows)

Was randomly asked to find out the number of files in the project at work and most searches on Google turned up instructions for doing it in Unix/Linux. Figured I should put the Windows version here for future reference.

Fire up MS-Command Prompt and...

dir "c:\myworkspace" /s /b | find /c ".txt"
Returns the count of number of text files in current directory (myworkspace) and all sub-directories.

dir "c:\myworkspace" /s /b | find ".txt" > listOfFiles.txt
Outputs the list of text files in current directory and all sub-directories to the file listOfFiles.txt


How it works:
Taken from Computer Hope.com - MS DOS and command prompt

dir [path] [attributes]
Displays a list of files and subdirectories in the directory specified by [path].
/sDisplays files in specified directory and all subdirectories.
/bUses bare format (no heading information or summary).


find [attribute] "string"
Searches for a text string in a file or files.
/cDisplays only the count of lines containing the string.



Thus by piping the output of the dir command to find, we count the number of times ".txt" appears in the output of the dir command instead of the number of times ".txt" appears in the files within the directory.

Happy counting! ^^

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exclude directories from chown

There's been times when I needed to recursively change ownership of files in a directory but leave certain files alone (e.g. snapshot folders). Came across a highly useful post from Posteet on how to do it. In my case, I needed to exclude directories owned by root and the .snapshot directory. So # find . -xdev -name .snapshot -or -user root -prune -print | xargs chown < user> :< group>
Read more

Flash game: Cargo Bridge

Image
I came across this fun little puzzle game called Cargo Bridge on Kongregate . Most levels are quite do-able (with lots of walkthroughs available if you're stuck). Thus I shall only post solutions for the more difficult levels. Oh, and the game is a little buggy so if solutions which should work keeps failing for some reason, try deleting the offending joint and rebuilding. Or quit to the main menu and restart the level. Level 12: A non-optimal-but-definitely-works solution for those who are stuck. =) Level 16: This level is quite a pain. One of the suggested solutions on the walkthrough actually had an arched bridge which didn't work well for me as the little guy got stuck. I then came across another solution which was flat, but broke too easily. Thus I modified the support structure and hey presto, it worked! Level 18: Probably one of the most difficult levels. Thanks to Tasselfoot for his walkthrough on YouTube for giving birth to this solution. Don't worry if...
Read more

Copying Sony recovery partition to new harddisk

For those whose harddisk (HDD) are dying or simply looking to upgrade to a bigger, faster drive, here's how to backup your hidden Sony recovery partition to the new drive. Firstly, plug both disks to a computer. For me, I plugged both disks to my desktop (with my original desktop HDD unplugged to avoid accidentally messing with it). Next, get a Linux live CD. There are a few variations available, most commonly Knoppix and Ubuntu . I'd go with Ubuntu for this example. Boot the live CD run the software Disk Utility in Ubuntu to check that both HDD are detected. Make note of the drive letters for each. For my case, as the original is the master drive, it is detected as sda and the new one is detected as sdb . Create a partition in the new HDD about the same size as the hidden partition (around 10GB). Fire up the Linux terminal and copy the hidden partition over. (Note that your partition number may vary. Use Disk Utility to check for the correct partition numbers.) sudo dd if=/d...
Read more