user4556274 has already answered the why. My answer serves only to provide additional information for how to properly count files.
In the Unix community the general consensus is that parsing the output of ls
is a very very bad idea, since filenames can contain control characters or hidden characters. For example, due to a newline character in a filename, we have ls | wc -l
tell us there's 5 lines in the output of ls
(which it does have), but in reality there's only 4 files in the directory.
$> touch FILE$'\n'NAME
$> ls
file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt FILE?NAME
$> ls | wc -l
5
Method #1: find utility
The find
command, which is typically used for working around parsing filenames, can help us here by printing the inode number. Be it a directory or a file, it only has one unique inode number. Thus, using -printf "%i\n"
and excluding .
via -not -name "."
we can have an accurate count of the files. (Note the use of -maxdepth 1
to prevent recursive descending into subdirectories)
$> find -maxdepth 1 -not -name "." -print
./file2.txt
./file1.txt
./FILE?NAME
./file3.txt
$> find -maxdepth 1 -not -name "." -printf "%i\n" | wc -l
4
Method #2 : globstar
Simple, quick, and mostly portable way:
$ set -- *
$ echo $#
228
set
command is used to set positional parameters of the shell ( the $<INTEGER>
variables, as in echo $1
). This is often used to work around /bin/sh
limitation of lacking arrays. A version that performs extra checks can be found in Gille's answer over on Unix&Linux.
In shells that support arrays, such as bash
, we can use
items=( dir/* )
echo ${#items[@]}
as proposed by steeldriver in the comments.
Similar trick to find
method which used wc
and globstar can be used with stat
to count inode numbers per line:
$> LC_ALL=C stat ./* --printf "%i\n" | wc -l
4
An alternative approach is to use a wildcard in for
loop. (Note, this test uses a different directory to test whether this approach descends into subdirectories, which it does not - 16 is the verified number of items in my ~/bin
)
$> count=0; for item in ~/bin/* ; do count=$(($count+1)) ; echo $count ; done | tail -n 1
16
Method #3: other languages/interpreters
Python can also deal with problematic filenames via printing the length of a list given my os.listdir()
function (which is non-recursive, and will only list items in the directory given as argument).
$> python -c "import os ; print os.listdir('.')"
['file2.txt', 'file1.txt', 'FILE\nNAME', 'file3.txt']
$> python -c "import os ; print(len(os.listdir('.')))"
4
See also