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find / -xdev | wc -l

This is a command I found. COuld anybody help me understand what is -xdev and what is wc -l?

Thank you so much!

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 7 '12 at 8:30

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Please do one round of research before posting here. –  Konza Nov 7 '12 at 7:05

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

From the find(1) man page:

    -xdev  Don't descend directories on other filesystems.

find won't cross mount points.

From the wc(1) man page:



       -l, --lines
              print the newline counts

wc counts the number of lines being piped in.

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try ls -l | wc -l this will count number of files and folders in any directory.

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