finding directories with many files in a file system

[Bernhard Voelker]

I have e.g. a file system where most of the inodes space is used,
let's say 450k of 500k.  What command(s) would I use to find out
which sub-directories are eating most of the inodes?

Well, I could use something like this:

  $ find .  -xdev -type d \
    | while read f ; do \
        printf "%d %s: " "$(find "$f" -xdev | wc -l)" "$f" ; \
      done \
      | sort -k1,1n

But this a) is lame and b) doesn't count hardlinks well.

Do we have such a command (option) already?
If not, what about a new du(1) option that reports inodes
instead of blocks/bytes statistics, i.e. "du --inodes"?

Have a nice day,
Berny