Possible enhancement: file count

[Fernando Pereira]

Hello everybody,

First post here, so sorry if I lack knowledge on the details...
I'm doing system admin in a company and user directories here get pretty
big sometimes. Not only they reach 100GB easily but they are produce
millions of small files due to their work nature.
So, a very "simple" old task is to check the users space consumption and,
btw, check if they don't have a hot directory with many many small files,
which then should be archived.

Anyway, I was looking for the most efficient way to do that and I couldn't
find  satisfying answer. Of course we can use find | wc, but I am really
looking for a simple and efficient solution just like du exists for the
file size.
IMHO, obtaining the file count in a given directory seems a kind of "disk
usage", and the same way that with df one can see inodes, why not having a
file count option to du?

I would like to know if this is against the concept of du. Otherwise I
think it would help many people out there, and I might be able to
contribute to its implementation.

Cheers