Linux – How to count all subfolders in an directory

If you are using ext3 in Linux, the limit is explained by Wikipedia:

There is a limit of 31998 sub-directories per one directory, stemming from its limit of 32000 links per inode.

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)