UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I've searched the man page for an option for the ls command to print the number of files in a directory. I'm moving files and folders around and thought a count of files would be a quick way to determine if I was missed one somewhere. Some "unix's" shells do this I think... maybe linux...

Anybody know how to do this real quick

System is: SunOS 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10 KSH

I did this but is comes back with byte count rather than a file count.
ls -l |wc


Thanks All )

ls -l | wc -l

Dang.... I knew I was close...

Thx Jim

one little minor problem, at least what i have encountered, is that ls -l list out the files, including the "total" line on the very first line. wc -l will count that line too. So its just sufficient to exclude the switch , or use ls -1 instead.

You can add the -l option to wc, or you can do it in the shell itself, which will be much faster:

Code:

set -- *
echo $#