Count number of subdirectories ignoring parent directories

Question

I would like to count number of subdirectories in depth 2, but ignore the parent directories of depth 1 in the bash script.

Example:

root_dir ---|--ignore_dir ---|--count_dir
            |                |--count_dir ---|--ignore_dir
            |                                |--ignore_dir
            |--ignore_dir ---|--count_dir
                             |--count_dir
                             |--count_dir

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could try something like this :

find /path/to/root_dir -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d | wc -l

Here we explicitely limit the depth of find to 2 (no more, no less) and list all directories. wc -l counts the number of lines from the output of the find command.

Note:

If your folders names contain newlines, specific characters or unusual encoding, using wc -l will yield incorrect results.

Taking inspiration from this question, you can instead print a character for each folder found, and count the resulting number of characters.

You could use the following snippet :

find /path/to/root_dir -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d -printf '.' | wc -c