Recursively counting files in a Linux directory

This should work:

find DIR_NAME -type f | wc -l

Explanation:

• -type f to include only files.
• | (and not ¦) redirects find command's standard output to wc command's standard input.
• wc (short for word count) counts newlines, words and bytes on its input (docs).
• -l to count just newlines.

Notes:

• Replace DIR_NAME with . to execute the command in the current folder.
• You can also remove the -type f to include directories (and symlinks) in the count.
• It's possible this command will overcount if filenames can contain newline characters.

Explanation of why your example does not work:

In the command you showed, you do not use the "Pipe" (|) to kind-of connect two commands, but the broken bar (¦) which the shell does not recognize as a command or something similar. That's why you get that error message.

For the current directory:

find -type f | wc -l

If you want a breakdown of how many files are in each dir under your current dir:

for i in */ .*/ ; do 
    echo -n $i": " ; 
    (find "$i" -type f | wc -l) ; 
done

That can go all on one line, of course. The parenthesis clarify whose output wc -l is supposed to be watching (find $i -type f in this case).

On my computer, rsync is a little bit faster than find | wc -l in the accepted answer:

$ rsync --stats --dry-run -ax /path/to/dir /tmp

Number of files: 173076
Number of files transferred: 150481
Total file size: 8414946241 bytes
Total transferred file size: 8414932602 bytes

The second line has the number of files, 150,481 in the above example. As a bonus you get the total size as well (in bytes).

Remarks:

• the first line is a count of files, directories, symlinks, etc all together, that's why it is bigger than the second line.
• the --dry-run (or -n for short) option is important to not actually transfer the files!
• I used the -x option to "don't cross filesystem boundaries", which means if you execute it for / and you have external hard disks attached, it will only count the files on the root partition.