Hi i need to know how to find number of files in a directory? is there any system calls in fedora 12.And i need to know how to perform a operation if the that count increases by one?
Please help me..
Thanks in advance...

Try the following command:
Have a look here:
http://dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_10.html

You may need to write some script for doing that !

You can use simple bash commands as follows: Now, count contains the total no. of files under a directory.
Now, I think you can write your script to perform some operations based on this count variable.

This will count files only in a current directory. Directories, symlinks, devices, etc. are filtered out.

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hi friends, all answers relating to count the no of files, is ok. but if i write a script to do a operation every time i need to run that script to check file count. But i need a solution that it automatically detect and run that script program when count increases by one.
Thanks for help...

Upto what extent you have tried for this?
It's better if you present us the code what you have tried till now

I did not reply you yesterday assuming you need some system call to find the directories count. Now I understood you problem.

Still one thing is not clear.

Are you focusing on a single directory where files are created and count needs to be incremented by 1 when a new file is created ? OR

Are you keeping vigil on a directory tree hierarchy ?

i think Cron job would also work for you

Have a look at inotify

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Or dnotify http://linux.die.net/man/1/dnotify

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Dear Chrism01,

I am using fedora 11 and RHEL 5.3. I couldn't find dnotify command in any of these distors.

Does this utility exists in Debian family of distros ?

Could you please tell us which package provides us dnotify capability in Redhat based distros?

inotify, is a dnotify replacement.

do man inotify

See here also:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li...l-inotify.html

wow..inotify is a system call, I thought inotify is a command.

If you want live monitoring and not a periodic check based one then inotify is the only way to go.

Whether to use a system call or inotify-tools from command line will depend on how you are designing your solution (are you using C or something like that or scripting?). In any case you will need a kernel that's recent enough and has inotify support. Anything that's not from paleolithic will fulfill that requisite.

With the inotify command line tools you could do something like:

You can monitor for specific events and then do whatever you want with "$foo" inside the loop. Check the inotifywait man page for further details, ask back when/if you have a clear idea of what exactly do you want if you need more help.

You will need to install inotify-tools, the name of the package can vary from distro to distro.