Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 10:42:35 -0500 From: Jonathan Arnold <jdarnold@buddydog.org> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Simple file count question Message-ID: <4057206B.5050805@buddydog.org> In-Reply-To: <002501c40b24$8c600e10$0301a8c0@daveslaptop> References: <002501c40b24$8c600e10$0301a8c0@daveslaptop>
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Dave Carrera wrote:
> I know this is going to be simple but I cant find a suitable answer by
> trawling the web so I ask how do I count the number of certain files in a
> directory?
>
> So I am in my dir and want to count how many files begin with db and show me
> the number.
>
> I hope you can help me and thank you in advance for any help you may give
As you can see, the key command is 'wc'. It's a nice, simple little command
that does one thing and one thing well - it counts "words". If you don't
give it any flags, it tells you the number of lines, words, and bytes. Using
-l will count the number of lines. So you pipe the output of a command to
it and it will count stuff for you. Thus:
$ ls db* |wc -l
will give you a single number telling you the number of lines in its input;
in this case, the input is the output of 'ls db*', which is a simple listing
of all the files in the current directory beginning with 'db'. Thus, you
get a count of the number of files in the directory that begin with db.
A very typical Un*x way of doing things - string together building block
commands to get your output. Flexbile if arcane.
--
Jonathan Arnold (mailto:jdarnold@buddydog.org)
Daemon Dancing in the Dark, a FreeBSD weblog:
http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/
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