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. > > -- > Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
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