How do I count all the files recursively through directories

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r dir
do printf "%s:\t" "$dir"; find "$dir" -type f | wc -l; done

Thanks to Gilles and xenoterracide for safety/compatibility fixes.

The first part: find . -maxdepth 1 -type d will return a list of all directories in the current working directory.  (Warning: -maxdepth is a GNU extension and might not be present in non-GNU versions of find.)  This is piped to...

The second part: while read -r dir; do (shown above as while read -r dir(newline)do) begins a while loop – as long as the pipe coming into the while is open (which is until the entire list of directories is sent), the read command will place the next line into the variable dir. Then it continues...

The third part: printf "%s:\t" "$dir" will print the string in $dir (which is holding one of the directory names) followed by a colon and a tab (but not a newline).

The fourth part: find "$dir" -type f makes a list of all the files inside the directory whose name is held in $dir. This list is sent to...

The fifth part: wc -l counts the number of lines that are sent into its standard input.

The final part: done simply ends the while loop.

So we get a list of all the directories in the current directory. For each of those directories, we generate a list of all the files in it so that we can count them all using wc -l. The result will look like:

./dir1: 234
./dir2: 11
./dir3: 2199
...

Try find . -type f | wc -l, it will count of all the files in the current directory as well as all the files in subdirectories. Note that all directories will not be counted as files, only ordinary files do.

Try:

find /path/to/start/at -type f -print | wc -l

as a starting point, or if you really only want to recurse through the subdirectories of a directory (and skip the files in that top level directory)

find `find /path/to/start/at -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print` -type f -print | wc -l