Identifying dirs with lots of files

[Robert Funk_1]

Hi, I'm a new unix admin. and am trying to identify directories on my HP-UX 11.00 server that contain large number of files so I can target them for nightly cleanup.

I've discovered the du command which is somewhat helpful, but would like a command /script that tells me the number of files in all directories.

Thank you...

[Pete Randall]

Something like this, perhaps:

echo "directory counts" > /tmp/dircount.out
for dir in `find /start_point -type d`
do
ll $dir |wc -l >> /tmp/dircount.out
done


Pete

[Mark Grant]

Robert

This script is not too much of a problem if you start with the "ls -lR" command but I'm concerned that it is a really uncommon thing to do. In most cases, files on a unix system that are good targets for deleteion are in /tmp and /var/tmp and perhaps users home directories.

I think what will be more useful for you is the "find" command. This will allow you search for large files, or files that haven't been modified in ages or files called "core" (very good target for deletion that one) and the deletion can be combined into one command. For example to delete all files on the system called core.

find / -name core -exec rm {} \;

Maybe you need to look at the man page for "find" and perhaps find where redundant files reside. I think number of files in a directory is a bit of a blunt tool.

[Umapathy S]

for dir in `find . -type d`
do
echo "$dir"; ls -l $dir|wc -l
done

HTH,
Umapathy

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I don't like to run find from the root directory because of the system load so I change this to run from the currend working directory.

#!/usr/bin/sh

typeset -i10 BIG=500 # defines what you call "lots of files"
find . -type d | while read X
do
typeset -10 KNT=$(ls -a ${X} | wc -l)
if [[ ${KNT} -ge ${BIG} ]]
then
echo "${X}\t${KNT}"
fi
done

You can change find . to find / to do this from the root directory. You could simplify this using find -type d -size +30000c but that is not qa good test because directories that have had many files removed will still be large.

[Brian Bergstrand]

Each file/dir is linked to it's parent dir. So you can use find to search for dirs with only a certain # of links.

find / -type d -links +1000 -print

The link count includes directories and files, so this could find directories with 1000 sub-directories and no files, but that would be unusual.

HTH.

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Try this,

for dir in `find . -type d`
do
echo "$dir => `find $dir -type f |wc -l`"
done

Hope this helps.

Regds