Shell Programming and Scripting

This will likely be a simple one for you gurus!

I have the following line:

xcount=`ls -1p $process_dir | grep -v '\/' | grep -c "$"`

xcount ends up being a count of the files in the directory represented by process_dir. So if I have 10 files in there like test.dat, test.rpt, etc. it indeed gives me a count of 10.

What I am wondering is, how does the "$" work at the end of the command? None of the file names have "$" character in them. How does UNIX use this??

Thanks!!!!

To grep that is a pattern that matches the end-of-line. You could do:
grep "xyz$" filename
to get a list of lines with xyz as the last thing in the line.

grep "$"

matches any line with an end-of-line. It's an odd way of doing things. The -c asks for a count. Most people woulda used "wc -l" to end that command.