On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 10:57:56AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Thursday 27 September 2018 08:31:27 Greg Wooledge wrote: > > > On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 10:27:03PM +0000, Long Wind wrote: > > > can ls show number of items in a folder?Thanks! > > > > https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/004 > > And finally, an "ls -l|wc -l" from the cli gives the answer to the > question asked.
The question that was asked was a yes-or-no question. And the answer to it is "no". However, some people will not perceive "no" to be a USEFUL answer, so I provided an answer with much more depth. "ls -l|wc -l" gives you the number of newlines contained in a stream generated by printing the names of SOME of the files in the current working directory. It omits all of the filenames that begin with a period. It includes all of the newlines that are contained within filenames, and thus gives an inaccurate count if any of the filenames contain newlines. Since this is a Debian mailing list, I won't attempt to go into the behaviors of ls on other Unix-based systems. The two problems already mentioned should suffice for this list.
