Count the number of files in a directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All,

How do i find out the number of files in a directory using unix command ?

2 
ls -l . | egrep -c '^-'
3

Hi vgersh99,

Thanks it works!
If i want to find the number of *sorts file in a directory, what would be the modification needed to the code?

4 
ls -l * | grep '^-' | grep sorts | wc -l
5 
ls -l *sorts | awk '/^-/{c++}END{ print c }'
6

Hi Lorcan,

Thanks but if there's no *sorts file in the directory, the output will be reflected below. Is there any way i can remove the "No match" output, leaving only the "0" as the output ?

$ ls -l *sorts | wc -l
No match
0

7 
ls -l *sorts 2>/dev/null | awk '/^-/{c++}END{ print c }'
8

Hi Matrix,

Some error encountered when using yr code.

$ ls -l *sorts 2>/dev/null | awk '/^-/{c++}END{ print c }'
Ambiguous output redirect

9 
-rw-r--r--    1 user  grp          0 Aug 16 14:34 asorts
-rw-r--r--    1 user  grp          0 Aug 16 14:34 bsorts
drwxr-xr-x    2 user  grp       4096 Aug 16 14:35 dsorts/

ls -l *sorts | awk '/^-/{c++}END{ print c}'
2

only count of files [*sorts] is displayed

10 
find /path -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*sorts" | wc -l
11

hi ghostdog,

Some error found when using yr code

$ find /path -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*sorts" | wc -l
find: bad option -maxdepth
find: path-list predicate-list
0

12

What's your OS version

13

This is the simple option.

ls -l "directory name" | grep "^-" | wc -l

or

ls -l . | grep "^-" | wc -l

0r

ls -l * | grep "^-" wc -l

or generic could be like this in shell script--

#!/usr/bin/ksh

echo "display the list of files"
ls -ltr

echo "Read the directory in which you want to count the number of files"
read dir

ls -l $dir | grep "^-" | wc -l

14

first, make sure you have /path as a directory?? if not substitute ..however if you don't have the maxdepth option, you can use prune, so that it don't traverse subdirectories (if that's what you want.)

# find * -type f -name "*sorts"  -print -o -type d -prune |wc -l
15

Hi namishtiwari,

Thanks your code works.

Thanks to all others who have given me inputs as well.
Really appreciate that.!!