How to get the number of files in a folder as a variable?

Question

Using bash, how can one get the number of files in a folder, excluding directories from a shell script without the interpreter complaining?

With the help of a friend

Answer 1

The most straightforward, reliable way I can think of is using the find command to create a reliably countable output.

Counting characters output of find with wc:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '.' | wc --char

or string length of the find output:

a=$(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '.')
echo ${#a}

or using find output to populate an arithmetic expression:

echo $(($(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '+1')))

Answer 2

Get rid of the quotes. The shell is treating them like one file, so it's looking for "ls -l".

Answer 3

Simple efficient method:

#!/bin/bash
RES=$(find ${SOURCE} -type f | wc -l)

Answer 4

Here's one way you could do it as a function. Note: you can pass this example, dirs for (directory count), files for files count or "all" for count of everything in a directory. Does not traverse tree as we aren't looking to do that.

function get_counts_dir() {

    # -- handle inputs (e.g. get_counts_dir "files" /path/to/folder)
    [[ -z "${1,,}" ]] && type="files" || type="${1,,}"
    [[ -z "${2,,}" ]] && dir="$(pwd)" || dir="${2,,}"

    shopt -s nullglob
    PWD=$(pwd)
    cd ${dir}

    numfiles=(*)
    numfiles=${#numfiles[@]}
    numdirs=(*/)
    numdirs=${#numdirs[@]}

    # -- handle input types files/dirs/or both
    result=0
    case "${type,,}" in
        "files")
            result=$((( numfiles -= numdirs )))
        ;;
        "dirs")
            result=${numdirs}
        ;;
        *)  # -- returns all files/dirs
            result=${numfiles}
        ;;

    esac

    cd ${PWD}
    shopt -u nullglob

    # -- return result --
    [[ -z ${result} ]] && echo 0 || echo ${result}
}

Examples of using the function :

folder="/home"
get_counts_dir "files" "${folder}"
get_counts_dir "dirs" "${folder}"
get_counts_dir "both" "${folder}"

Will print something like :

2
4
6