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

Explantion

The ls command will lists all the files/folders in the current directory. When -1 is added to the option, it lists the 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, it means 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