Find count of files matching a pattern in a directory in linux

Question

I am new to linux. I have a directory in linux with approx 250,000 files I need to find count of number of files matching a pattern.

I tried using following command :

Answer 1

You should generally avoid ls in scripts and in fact, performing the calculation in a shell function will avoid the "argument list too long" error because there is no exec boundary and so the ARGV_MAX limit doesn't come into play.

number_of_files () {
    if [ -e "$1" ]; then
        echo "$#"
    else
        echo 0
    fi
}

The conditional guards against the glob not being expanded at all (which is the default out of the box; in Bash, you can shopt -s nullglob to make wildcards which don't match any files get expanded into the empty string).

Try it:

number_of_files 20061101-20131101_kh5x7tte9n_2010_*