Populate an array of the file names and then print how many entries are in the array:

$ ( shopt -s nullglob; files=( .* * );  echo "${#files[@]}" )
124

That will work correctly even if your file names contain newlines, unlike anything piped to wc -l. I'm using a subshell to restrict the environment that shopt -s nullglob applies to - if you don't care about that then you don't need a subshell.

Note that the above includes both files and directories (which are, of course, a type of file) - if you want to exclude directories then you need a different solution.

posted almost 2 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3mo ago

Ed Morton‭

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