Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 13:41:45 -0800 From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> To: cpghost <cpghost@cordula.ws> Cc: Daniel Bye <freebsd-questions@slightlystrange.org>, White Hat <pigskin_referee@yahoo.com>, John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Determining the number of files in a directory Message-ID: <20071103214145.GB6857@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <20071103210718.6b12f46e@epia-2.farid-hajji.net> References: <538619.51984.qm@web34408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20071103124151.GA3207@torus.slightlystrange.org> <20071103124932.GB3207@torus.slightlystrange.org> <200711031044.43523.lists@jnielsen.net> <20071103210718.6b12f46e@epia-2.farid-hajji.net>
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On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 09:07:18PM +0100, cpghost wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 10:44:43 -0400
> John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> That's better than ls(1), which is terribly slow at displaying
> (actually: at sorting) large directories. In this case, better
> turn off sorting with 'ls -f':
>
> $ time ls -f /usr/local/news/News | wc -l
> 0.42 real 0.29 user 0.07 sys
> 35935
>
> $ time ls /usr/local/news/News | wc -l
> 147.02 real 33.92 user 0.07 sys
> 35935
And ls -lf makes working with awk faster, too. E.g:
% ls -lf | awk '$8 == 2007 {print $9}'
% ls -ltf | awk '$8 == 2007 {print $9}'
If you've got a large number of files, ls -lf is roughly
twice as fast.
gary
>
> -cpghost.
>
> --
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--
Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
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