quick....what's the Unix command to find the total number of files in a directory?

[bigrash]

did a search everywhere and the only thing that I could find was wc which is wordcount. I couldn't find any command that counts the number of files though.

btw..it's for my homework

 

[jaybittle]

ls | wc -w


you can also restrict ls to list only files..

cheers,
--jb

 

[bigrash]

hey thanks jaybittle. That's what I needed.


I tried to find the total number of files including hidden files and I tried this:

ls -la | wc -w

I got some weird number though. is that command correct

 

[n0cmonkey]

ls -la | wc -l

wc -l will count by line, the -l flag will give you 1 file per line.

EDIT: Thats how I do it (or I look at the Total at the end of the ls). I think wc -c will give you a character count...

 

[DaHitman]

ls -l | wc -l


I have been using that for more than a decade..

 

[bigrash]

thanks n0cmonkey. That's exactly what I was looking for.

DaHitman, that command doesn't show the number for hidden files

 

[Armitage]

You should probably use this:

ls -1aA | wc -l

The problem with ls -la is that it will give you 3 extra lines in the count:
total 8524
.
..

Note that the first argument to ls is a one, not a lower case L.

 

[n0cmonkey]

1 extra line. "." and ".." are files.

 

[Armitage]

<< 1 extra line. "." and ".." are files. >>



Well, yea ... everything is a file in unix .
I assumed he didn't want to count those two, but I could be wrong.

Another thing ... if you only want to count files which are not also directories, you can do this:

ls -1ap | grep -v $'/' | wc -l

You should be able to achieve the same thing with the -I option to ls, but I couldn't get it to work !?!