PHP script to help identify high folders using many inodes

file-counter.php

<?php

set_time_limit(0);

$directory = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('../');

$counters = [];

foreach ($directory as $item) {
    if (!is_dir($item)) {
        continue;
    }

    $parts = explode('/', $item);
    $basename = end($parts);

    if (strpos($basename, '.') === 0) {
        continue;
    }

    $itemIterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($item));
    $counters[(string) $item] = iterator_count($itemIterator);
}

arsort($counters);

foreach ($counters as $path => $count) {
    echo $path.': '.$count.'<br/>'.PHP_EOL;
}

echo "Total: ".array_sum($counters);

Great!
How to adapt for returning only the grand total, without folder distribution?

There may be more efficient ways to do it, but you can get the total of all folders by adding this at the end:

echo "Total: ".array_sum($counters);

Many thanks for your feedback but I'm getting strange results that way:

../public_html: 173441
Total: 347313../www: 173441
Total: 347313../tmp: 201
Total: 347313../mail: 150
Total: 347313../ssl: 22
Total: 347313../logs: 17
Total: 347313../etc: 16
Total: 347313../ppdesign.cf: 9
Total: 347313../access-logs: 8
Total: 347313../public_ftp: 4
Total: 347313../wordpress-backups: 2
Total: 347313../lscache: 2
Total: 347313

This total is, in fact, the total of all of the above, including 2x 173441

Are public_html and www perhaps the same folder? linked with a symlink? I know cPanel does that, and it would explain the identical file count.

I suppose it would be possible to folder out symlinks somehow, perhaps by tweaking the FilesystemIterator::FOLLOW_SYMLINKS flag on the RecursiveDirectoryIterator.

Yep, that's right, it's a symlink in cPanel and I resolved my issue by simply dividing the total by 2 as I just wanted to receive the total only by email with a cron. Many thanks for your help!