awk command to find the count of files ina directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi Gurus,

can anyone provide a awk command to get teh count of number of file sin a specific directory.

appreciate any kind of information..

thanks

2

This works but only if there actually are files in the directory... if there are only directories, or no files at all, it responds with an error and a '-1', because the 'ls -l' fails

ls -l *.* | wc | awk -F ' ' '{print $1-1}'
3 
ls -1  |awk 'END{print NR}'
4

ls -l |grep '^-' | wc-l

5

OP had asked a solution with awk :slight_smile:

moreover the above could be modified as just

ls -1 | wc -l
6

By doing so, it wil count the directories also my dear pal

7

awk script for a specific directory (ie. a directory you specify) :

awk 'BEGIN {
	while ( ( "ls -l /yourdir" | getline line ) >0 ) {
		if ( line ~ /^-/ ){
			c++
		}
	}
	print "Total files: ", c
     }
'

or simply (for a specific directory):

ls -ltr | awk '/^-/{ c++;}END{print c}'
8

You are right, that would include directories as well.

My awk command should do then ! :slight_smile:

Thanks for pointing it out ! :slight_smile:

9

zsh:

with ...

set -- *(.D);num_files="${#@}"

.. and without dot files:

set -- *(.);num_files="${#@}"
10

matrixmadhan,

Use ls -l instead of ls -1 because it fails with filenames with spaces.

ls -1 | wc -l

also fails.

Regards

11

Am sorry that ls -1 won't fail for files having spaces in their names

if you are using ls -l instead of ls -1 then explicitly you need to subtract 1 from the result, if you are directly operating ls -l on wc -l.

12

I'm sorry you're right, I was confused to see that there was 1 less with ls -1 but I forgot the first line of ls -l.

Regards