I'm learning to work with Sed and Grep and I'm having a small problem. I want to count how many files are in the current directory with a specific file EXT.

For example I may want to know how many .txt files are in the current directory. I then want to put that count number into a variable.

I thought I could use grep and do something like:

mycounter=`grep *.txt` but this does not work. I believe I'm missing more parameters, but I am unsure what to place in there.

So am I heading in the correct direction, or is there a way I could use ls ?

Thanks for your help.

Fegero

grep is used to check a value that's inside file's.

grep root /etc/passwd for example wil list all lines (1 in this case) that have the word root in them.

ls will list files, if you add *txt it will list all files ending with txt

wc prints the number of bytes, words, and/or lines

ls *txt | wc -l

The above command will list all files ending with txt (ls *txt) and count the amount of hits (wc -l)

See manpages to find out what other options each command has (man ls, man wc and man grep).

Hope this gets you on th right track again.