find - searching an exact number of files in a Linux directory

Question

I want recursively count files in a Linux directory using this

find DIR_NAME -type f | wc -l

my question is , how to stop the find execution above if more than 1000 files are found in that folder ? Is it possible ? Or do I need to wait find execution ?

Answer 1

You can use head to limit the number of lines returned by find:

find DIR_NAME -type f | head -n 1000 | wc -l

The head program will exit after the first thousand lines, find will receive SIGPIPE and exit as well.