SFTP: return number of files in remote directory?

Question

I sent a batch of files to a remote server via SFTP. If it were a local directory I could do something like this ls -l | wc -l to get the total number of files.

Answer 1

Use a batch file to run commands remotely and get the data back to work with in bash:

Make your batch file called mybatch.txt with these sftp commands:

cd your_directory/your_sub_directory
ls -l

Save it out and give it 777 permissions.

chmod 777 mybatch.txt

Then run it like this:

sftp your_username@your_server.com < mybatch.txt

It will prompt you for the password, enter it.

Then you get the output dumped to bash terminal. So you can pipe that to wc -l like this:

sftp your_user@your_server.com < mybatch.txt | wc -l
Connecting to your_server.com...
your_user@your_server.com's password:
8842

The 8842 is the number of lines returned by ls -l in that directory.

Instead of piping it to wc, you could dump it to a file for parsing to determine how many files/folders.