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Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)

Terminal - Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)
perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a-1,"\n"}'
2009-07-23 20:14:33
User: recursiverse
Functions: perl
1
Up
Down
Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)
time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}'

205413

real 0m0.497s

user 0m0.220s

sys 0m0.268s

time { ls |wc -l; }

205413

real 0m3.776s

user 0m3.340s

sys 0m0.424s

*********

** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster:

find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l

sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; }

205414

real 0m0.456s

user 0m0.116s

sys 0m0.328s

** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version

perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"'

sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"'

205414

real 0m0.415s

user 0m0.176s

sys 0m0.232s

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Alternatives

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Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

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What others think

what if you have to recurse? I don't know how to extend the perl to recurse, but it would be interesting to compare to

find . -type f | wc -l

On the speed difference, I'm guessing perl has an advantage since it really doesn't deal with the filename strings like ls must. Somehow ls|wc seems to use twice as much system call time as the perl but also spends more time in userspace presumably shuttling filenames around. Any ideas?

Comment by bwoodacre 199 weeks and 6 days ago

And if it is the filename overhead, I wonder how much faster 'ls -i | wc -l' is.

Comment by bwoodacre 199 weeks and 6 days ago

In my home, I got the following counts:

$ find . -type f | wc -l 15812 $ perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a-1,"\n"}' 109 $ ls |wc -l 14
Comment by kzh 199 weeks and 6 days ago

@kzh you forgot to time the results, that is what is being measured! Also, your home dir is a bad place to test because there are many hidden files/directories which find/ls ignores as well as many levels of subdirs which perl or ls do not consider, that is why your file counts vary.

Comment by bwoodacre 199 weeks and 6 days ago

~$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}'280

real 0m0.117s

user 0m0.010s

sys 0m0.000s

~$ time { ls |wc -l; }

108

real 0m0.007s

user 0m0.010s

sys 0m0.000s

Looks like your perl line does it ~15 times slower than the ls on my machine.

Comment by tedkozma 199 weeks and 6 days ago

@bwoodacre

you could do...

perl -e 'use File::Find;$c=0;find sub {++$c;},".";print $c,"\n"'

but it is not faster than

find . | wc -l

which made me realize that

find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l

...is faster than my original oneliner :}

i'm going to make an edit with this comment

Comment by recursiverse 199 weeks and 6 days ago

@tedkozma

the perl liner should be faster on larger directories. my test directory had ~200k files.

Comment by recursiverse 199 weeks and 6 days ago

a slight modification brings perl slightly ahead again (though not by much and only for very large directories)...

perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c,"\n"'
Comment by recursiverse 199 weeks and 6 days ago
ls -U1 | wc -l

is much faster because it doesn't have to read in the whole directory listing into memory and sort it

Comment by hfs 151 weeks ago

Your point of view

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