OS: Linux
Skill Level: Beginner
Prerequisites: Basic Linux CLI and regular expression understanding
Intro:
When a folder only has a few items in it this trick is not that important, but let say the folder you are looking at has 754,586 files in it? Here is a quick trick to get an accurate count of the items in a folder.
Example Folder Listing:
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 vesc vesc 1465 Apr 14 2014 backup.py
drwxrwxr-x. 7 vesc vesc 4096 May 1 23:13 Code
drwxrwxr-x. 2 vesc vesc 4096 Apr 12 2014 Downloads
-rwxrwxr. 1 vesc vesc 1279 Aug 17 07:19 ipcheck.py
-rw-rw-r. 1 vesc vesc 16 Oct 10 04:20 ip.dat
-rw-rw-r. 1 vesc vesc 6045 Aug 16 08:51 movielist.txt
-rw-. 1 root root 294944 Apr 26 18:31 text.out
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 vesc vesc 529276 Apr 8 2014 slowhttptest
drwxrwxr-x. 2 vesc vesc 4096 Jan 2 2014 somefile
Total items in folder:
ls -1 | wc -l
[vesc@indigofs ~\]$ ls -1 | wc -l
9
Number of files in the folder:
ls -l | grep ^- | wc -l
[vesc@indigofs ~\]$ ls -l | grep ^- | wc -l
6
Number of sub-folders in the folder:
ls -l | grep ^d | wc -l
[vesc\@indigofs ~\]$ ls -l | grep ^d | wc -l
3