Directory links and Sub-Directory Count

When you view a file or directory in Linux with the long listing of ls, ls -l or perhaps using the command stat we can see the number of hard links to the file or directory; if using stat we can choose to output only the number of hard links with:

stat -c %h /usr/share/doc

Output of ls -l

Output from stat against the same directory

For a directory this value will always be a minimum of 2; the actual name and the directory and each directory has a link called . that points to itself. The directory . meaning this directory. Additionally to the hard link . each directory has a link .. , meaning the parent directory. In this way we can use the command

cd ..

to change to the parent directory.

Using cd .. to change to the parent directory

If each sub-directory then has a link to the parent directory we can easily calculate the number of sub-directories and given directory has.

• If the link count is 2 the directory has no sub-directories
• For each sub-directory that exists there will be a corresponding hard link .. that points to the parent directory
• So we can calculate the sub-directory count as SUBDIRS=LINKCOUNT-2

Using a script to count sub-directories

The video that follows will guide you through the demo 🙂