Determining the number of files in a directory

[cpghost]

On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 10:44:43 -0400
John Nielsen <lists at jnielsen.net> wrote:

> On Saturday 03 November 2007, Daniel Bye wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 12:41:51PM +0000, Daniel Bye wrote:
> > > On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 05:27:06AM -0700, White Hat wrote:
> > > > This is probably a dumb question; however, I never let a little
> > > > thing like that bother me in the past.
> > >
> > > Heheh! You and many more, my friend, myself absolutely included!
> > >
> > > > Using FreeBSD-6.2 and Bash, how do I determine the number of
> > > > files in a given directory? I have tried all sorts of
> > > > combinations using different flags with the 'ls' command;
> > > > however, none of them displays the number of files in the
> > > > directory.
> > >
> > >  $ ls | wc -l
> > >
> > > will show you how many files and directories in the current
> > > (target) directory. To count just files, and exclude directories,
> > > you could try something like
> > >
> > >  $ find /target/directory -type f -print | wc -l
> >
> > Except of course, that would descend into the subdirectories you're
> > trying not to count... Sorry - an object lesson in not hitting send
> > before you've tested what you scribbled.
> 
> find /target/directory -type f -maxdepth 1 | wc -l
> 
> should do the trick. See also man find and man wc, of course.

That's better than ls(1), which is terribly slow at displaying
(actually: at sorting) large directories. In this case, better
turn off sorting with 'ls -f':

$ time ls -f /usr/local/news/News | wc -l
        0.42 real         0.29 user         0.07 sys
   35935

$ time ls /usr/local/news/News | wc -l
      147.02 real        33.92 user         0.07 sys
   35935

-cpghost.

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