Hey guys!

I'm so glad I found this site, I've had so many questions and have been left alone for roughly a year scanning man pages but It's just not quite cutting it for some things.

So, I often like to list directories when browsing around my local machine, a friend's machine, or my web server. Especially the latter where size, permissions, and extensions really matter. The problem is most of the commands I use just don't quite show all the information I need!

If I use I get what I want, human readable file sizes, and I can sort the files in any number of ways, but it's messy and too much information I never use. With lots of files it can be huge and hard to read.

If I use I get a nice crisp clear output with file sizes but this isn't supported on my web server while in FTP mode in my shell.

Both of these have the same problem: after reading the man pages up and down I can't figure out how to simply list the total number of files in a given directory!

I hope these questions aren't ridiculous, I'd just like to see if there is a better way of doing this that other people know, I've held of on asking anyone until now to avoid all of the "RTFM" responses I'd get in IRC Channels.

Thanks in advance!