Getting the Total Number of Files/Folders in a Unix/Linux System Directory

There are times when we want to count the number of the files or folders in a directory. We can use the below trick to get that information.

Command

ls -1 | wc -l

Explanation

The ls command will list all the files/folders in the current directory. When -1 is added to the option, it lists one file/folder per line as below:

ls -1
foo.txt
bar.txt

The wc command is the word count command in a Unix system. One of its options is -l, which counts the number of lines.

Thus, if we pipe the above two commands, the output of ls -1 command (which lists the files/folders in the current directory) is taken as the input to the wc -l command (which counts the number of lines). Assuming foo.txt and bar.txt are the only files in the directory, the output of the above command will result as:

ls -1 | wc -l
2