Determining the number of files in a directory

[Pietro Cerutti]

White Hat wrote:
> This is probably a dumb question; however, I never let a little thing like that bother me in the past.
>  
> 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.
>  
> Other than, by writing a script to accomplish this feat, how could I achieve my goal?

I find that the most intuitive way is to use something like:

find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l

Where you can specify how many levels of subdirectories to include in
the count. Please note that count also includes the current directory (".").

To exclude hidden files (.*), use

find * -maxdepth 0 | wc -l

or

expr `ls -l | wc -l` - 1

instead.



>  
> Thanks!
>  


-- 
Pietro Cerutti

PGP Public Key:
http://gahr.ch/pgp

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