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From: John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org,
	Daniel Bye <freebsd-questions@slightlystrange.org>
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 10:44:43 -0400
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Cc: White Hat <pigskin_referee@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Determining the number of files in a directory
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On Saturday 03 November 2007, Daniel Bye wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 12:41:51PM +0000, Daniel Bye wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 05:27:06AM -0700, White Hat wrote:
> > > This is probably a dumb question; however, I never let a little thing
> > > like that bother me in the past.
> >
> > Heheh! You and many more, my friend, myself absolutely included!
> >
> > > Using FreeBSD-6.2 and Bash, how do I determine the number of files in
> > > a given directory? I have tried all sorts of combinations using
> > > different flags with the 'ls' command; however, none of them displays
> > > the number of files in the directory.
> >
> >  $ ls | wc -l
> >
> > will show you how many files and directories in the current (target)
> > directory. To count just files, and exclude directories, you could try
> > something like
> >
> >  $ find /target/directory -type f -print | wc -l
>
> Except of course, that would descend into the subdirectories you're
> trying not to count... Sorry - an object lesson in not hitting send
> before you've tested what you scribbled.

find /target/directory -type f -maxdepth 1 | wc -l

should do the trick. See also man find and man wc, of course.

JN