UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Any hint regading how are you recienving the files.

the records are ftp'd into a directory and then my script scans the directory for the files

I'm confused about what you want. First you say count the records. Then you say count the files.

Count the records (as vgersh99 has given) wc -l < filename

Count the files ls /dir/where/my/files/are | wc -l

Is this what you want?

Count all lines in all files (assuming there aren't too many files)
wc -l /dir/where/my/files/are/* | grep "total" | awk '{print $1}'

More information is required about *exactly* what it is you're trying to achieve....

Cheers
ZB

ok, this is what i'm doing:
files are being sent to one of my directories, my script will scan that directory and acquire the files, this is where i want to *count* the files to see how many i picked up from the directory, then i'm using SQL*Loader to load the file into a table, after loading i have a script than runs and tells me how many records were loaded into the table successfully, this is where i will compare the count from my loading script log to the *count* above. if i needed an sql count there wouldn't be a problem but these unix commands are new to me.

If you want to import files (read records) into the database using SQL* Loader, I believe you must be having a single file containing multiple records which you are inserting into the database. If that be the case the number of records can be found by: wc -l <filename_to_be _inserted>

BTW SQL* Loader generates a log of files inserted and rejected. You would not need any script to tell you that

HTH