Python Count Number of Files in a Directory

In this article, we will see how to count the number of files present in a directory in Python.

If the directory contains many files and you want to count the number of files present in a directory before performing any operations. For example, you want to move all files from one directory to another. Still, before moving them, we can count how many files are present in a directory to understand its impact and the time required to perform that operation.

There are multiple ways to count files of a directory. We will use the following four methods.

How to count Files in a directory

Example: Count Number Files in a directory

The ‘account’ folder present on my system has three files. Let’s see how to print the count of files.

import os

# folder path
dir_path = r'E:\account'
count = 0
# Iterate directory
for path in os.listdir(dir_path):
    # check if current path is a file
    if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(dir_path, path)):
        count += 1
print('File count:', count)

Output:

File count: 3

A compact version of the above code using a list comprehension.

import os

dir_path = r'E:\demos\files_demos\account'
print(len([entry for entry in os.listdir(dir_path) if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(dir_path, entry))]))

Count all files in the directory and its subdirectories

Sometimes we need to count files present in subdirectories too. In such cases, we need to use the recursive function to iterate each directory recursively to count files present in it until no further sub-directories are available from the specified directory.

The os.walk() Generate the file names in a directory tree by walking the tree either top-down or bottom-up. For each directory in the tree rooted at the directory top (including top itself), it yields a 3-tuple (dirpath, dirnames, filenames).

For example, calling the os.walk('path') will yield two lists for each directory it visits. The first list contains files, and the second list includes directories.

Let’s see how to use the os.walk() to count files present in a directory and its subdirectories.

Example:

The ‘account’ folder on my system contains three files and one subdirectory containing one file. so we must get a 4 as the final count.

import os

count = 0
for root_dir, cur_dir, files in os.walk(r'E:\account'):
    count += len(files)
print('file count:', count)

Output:

file count: 4

scandir() to count all files in the directory

The scandir() function of an os module returns an iterator of os.DirEntry objects corresponding to the entries in the directory.

• Use the os.scadir() function to get the names of both directories and files present in a given directory.
• Next, iterate the result returned by the scandir() function using a for loop
• Next, In each iteration of a loop, use the isfile() function to check if it is a file or directory. if yes increment the counter by 1

Note: If you need file attribute information along with the count, using the scandir() instead of listdir() can significantly increase code performance because os.DirEntry objects expose this information if the operating system provides it when scanning a directory.

Example:

import os

count = 0
dir_path = r'E:\account'
for path in os.scandir(dir_path):
    if path.is_file():
        count += 1
print('file count:', count)

Output:

file count: 3

fnmatch module to count all files in the directory

The fnmatch supports pattern matching, and it is faster.

• For example, we can use fnmatch to find files that match the pattern *.* The * is a wildcard which means any name. So *.* indicates any file name with any extension, nothing but all files.
• Next, we will use the filter() method to separate files returned by the listdir() function using the above pattern
• In the end, we will count files using the len() function

Example:

import fnmatch

dir_path = r'E:\demos\files_demos\account'
count = len(fnmatch.filter(os.listdir(dir_path), '*.*'))
print('File Count:', count)

Output:

File Count: 3