Locate folders with the most files

[randyripoff]

I've got kind of an odd situation. I'm running into inode limit issues with our VPS, and I can't seem to figure out what's creating all these files. I've had our host increase the inode limit twice, but still running into the same issues.

I've found some extra files in the qmail queue, but they're really only a drop in the bucket. Something is creating a large number of what must be very small files, and I'm not sure what it might be.

What I'm hoping to find is some sort of command that will show me how many files are in each folder on the server. Googling really hasn't helped in this case, so I'm hoping someone here can help.

[lomcevak]

Create this script, call it ct.sh

#!/bin/bash

find /mountpoint/* -xdev -type d | while read _dir
    do
        _ct=`find $_dir -type f | wc -l`
        echo $_ct $_dir
    done

Make is executable with: chmod 700 ct.sh

Then run it with:

./ct.sh | sort -k1,1nr | head 20

This will list the top 20 directories with many files.

[dijetlo]

I might use

 
inotifywatch -r  -e modify -t300 directory1

It will tell you which files got modified (or created) recursively from the directory named in directory 1 for however many seconds you set in "-t".
There is a lock out on the number of files a single instance can watch (8192 on my system as set by /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_usr_watches) if you call it recursively and your target is larger than that, it bombs,

[randyripoff]

Create this script, call it ct.sh

#!/bin/bash

find /mountpoint/* -xdev -type d | while read _dir
    do
        _ct=`find $_dir -type f | wc -l`
        echo $_ct $_dir
    done

Make is executable with: chmod 700 ct.sh

Then run it with:

./ct.sh | sort -k1,1nr | head 20

This will list the top 20 directories with many files.

Thanks. I was able to find the problem files. Now I just need to figure out what's creating them.