*Quickly* counting the number of files on a partition

[Madison Kelly]

Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> Madison>    Can I *quickly* get the number of files (and dirs, links,
> Madison> etc) on a given partition or under a certain directory? The two
> Madison> keeps are "quickly" and "partition"; it's can't traverse file
> Madison> systems /or/ be limited to a directory (and it's sub
> Madison> directories).
> 
> Depends:
> 
> 1/ what you mean by "file".  Most Unix filesystems can link multiple
> names to a single entity known as inode.

Files, directories and symlinks. Hard links and special files/devices I 
can ignore.

> 2/ if you need _just_ complete partitions or arbitrary directory trees.
> 
> If you're fine with counting just inodes on a complete partition, the
> answer is yes: man statfs(2) or man stat(1) (in particular the -f flag).
> 
> Otherwise, you need someone smarter than me to answer :)

w00ts!!

   '# stat -f /' (where '/' is the root partition) works absolutely 
beautifully on 'ext*' file systems (at least). However, it doesn't work 
on an SMB mounted partitions (and others?) though...

   This is a huge step forward, but if you or anyone can think of a 
similar trick for other file systems (or perhaps a file system-agnostic 
method) that would be really helpful, too.

   In the mean time, I can check the FS and if it's one that this trick 
will work on I can go ahead and use the nicer progress bar and just fall 
back on the current scheme for unsupported file systems... at least 
until I can find similar tricks for them, too.

Thank you *very* much!!

Madison

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           Madison Kelly (Digimer)
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