Another way to count the number of (non-hidden) entries in a directory in pure shell, which is also more accurate (it will count filenames that contain newlines correctly):

Code:

set -- *; echo $#

or

Code:

nof () { echo $# ;}; nof *

Unless the directory is empty. Then these options report 1 instead of zero..



To mitigate these corner cases, in bash 4 one can use :

Code:

shopt -s nullglob

so that * expands to the null string if the directory is empty (except for hidden files).

or one could try something like:

Code:

nof () { 
  if [ -e "$1" ]; then
    echo $#
  else
    echo 0
  fi
}
nof *

--
Note: this could be shortened still to

Code:

ls | wc -l

Since -1 is the default option of ls when the output is not a terminal