hi, i know this is a stupid question, but i don't actually know a simple way to do this. especially resursively. thanks for helping out!

This is really ghetto (counts lines in "ls") but might work:
Edit: I am sorry; did you want to know how to list the files in a directory, or count how many there are? This is for the latter.

Try ls -l|more
read man ls

yeah, i just wanted to be able to count how many there are thats all. it seems like this is actually kind of difficult to do. especially if you have a complex directory structure. because it counts the directories also... hmm. there has to be a simple way, this is such a basic need. thanks for the help guys.

You could use:
ls -la | grep '^-' | wc -l

The first character on the line will indicate the file type. A normal file will have a dash "-" character. If you want to count links, then use "grep '^[-l]'" which will include either regular files or links. However, symbolic links will start with an "l" character for both files and directories.

ls -la | grep '^[-l] | grep -v '\/$' | wc -l

This will exclude links to directories because they end with the forward slash character.

Or you could use the "--classify" option of ls so all directories have the "/" character appended to the name. This method will not count the "." and ".." entries.

ls -a --classify | grep -v '\/$' | wc -l

The "-v" option of grep will exclude lines that contain the patter. The pattern in this case is any line ending in a forward slash. Earlier, I used the pattern '^[-l]'. The "^" carat character in a pattern indicates the beginning of a line. The "$" character in a search pattern indicates the end of a line.

sweet.

i think "ls -laR | grep '^[-l]' | grep -v '\/$' | wc -l" works best for my purposes! thats a big help. im surprised its complex to do get something as simple as a directory file count. thanks!

Yikes...
I'd vote
Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

that would be my weapon of choice aswell

A problem with the above script is that it will count files in subdirectories also. You need to use the "maxdepth" option.

In a similar vein, you might also want to use the "-d" option for the ls command if you are using wildcards, such as counting files starting with an "s"

However, for complicated searches, the "find" command works best.
You can even count the number of regular files, owned by a particular user, larger than a certain size, that was modified in the last 8 hours. OK, this example is a bit contrived, but searching your system for "suid" files is a very common use.