Hello,

I'm thinking this should be an easy one, but perhaps not. What I'm looking for is a command that will simply give me the total number of files in a directory in integer form.

I realise I could write a script to do this, but I a wondering if there is a command that will do it for me...

ls -l|wc -l

Perfect, thanks for your help.

I was thinking I would have to cat the filenames into a temporary file to use wc, just 404ing I guess. Love those pipes.

Thanks again.

got to admit that: that may not be what you are exactly seeking
ls -l|wc -l would print total number of files+directories(but not hidden)+1
ls -1|wc -l ditto
ls -la1|wc -l now the hidden files+directories are included but the problem is it outputs the no of files+directories+1(could you find out why this +1?)
ls -1al|grep -e -r -c ;ok now we are going somewhere ; but there are still problems it prints the files +directories number which have
-r in it(all files must have -r-------- at least but directories would have dr????????) the problem with this is that suppose you chmod
707 to a directory it still gets counted;(i know that it is possible with ls and grep to count your files but i will leave it to you; do a little search read man pages and maybe you will get a good one)
now let's try find
find solves all the problems
find . -type f -maxdepth 1|wc -l
it prints the number of all your files in the current directory
now as a side work maybe you could try a perl one liner;
let me give you a hint ; try man 3pm Find::File
and also read
man find2perl
keep posted

Your right, ls -l | wc -l gives me one too many.
ls -1 | wc -l works perfectly though...

It's just for a music directory playlist, there aren't any subdirectories so it will suit my purposes fine.

Much obliged...

btw, the +1 is because this:
is at the top when you ls -l, but isn't when you ls -1

nice work!

lastly I had made another mistake which you didn't point out
i wrote man 3pm Find::File
but it should be File::Find
anyway i love perl
and i think it will be better that you write a simple perl one liner if you use the command frequently
as always perl is a little faster than using bash commands