I know this is going to be simple but I cant find a suitable answer by trawling the web so I ask how do I count the number of certain files in a directory?
So I am in my dir and want to count how many files begin with db and show me the number.
I hope you can help me and thank you in advance for any help you may give
As you can see, the key command is 'wc'. It's a nice, simple little command that does one thing and one thing well - it counts "words". If you don't give it any flags, it tells you the number of lines, words, and bytes. Using -l will count the number of lines. So you pipe the output of a command to it and it will count stuff for you. Thus:
$ ls db* |wc -l
will give you a single number telling you the number of lines in its input; in this case, the input is the output of 'ls db*', which is a simple listing of all the files in the current directory beginning with 'db'. Thus, you get a count of the number of files in the directory that begin with db. A very typical Un*x way of doing things - string together building block commands to get your output. Flexbile if arcane.
-- Jonathan Arnold (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) Daemon Dancing in the Dark, a FreeBSD weblog: http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/ _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
