linux - Recursively count all the files in a directory

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How can I count the number of folders in a drive using Linux?

I have a really deep directory tree on my Linux box. I would like to count all of the files in that path, including all of the subdirectories.

For instance, given this directory tree:

/home/blue
/home/red
/home/dir/green
/home/dir/yellow
/home/otherDir/

If I pass in /home, I would like for it to return four files. Or, bonus points if it returns four files and two directories. Basically, I want the equivalent of right-clicking a folder on Windows and selecting properties and seeing how many files/folders are contained in that folder.

How can I most easily do this? I have a solution involving a Python script I wrote, but why isn't this as easy as running ls | wc or similar?

Answer

find . -type f | wc -l

Explanation:
find . -type f finds all files ( -type f ) in this ( . ) directory and in all sub directories, the filenames are then printed to standard out one per line.

This is then piped | into wc (word count) the -l option tells wc to only count lines of its input.

Together they count all your files.