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

The easiest way I have found is to use the lftp client which supports a shell-like syntax to transfer the output of remote ftp commands to local processes.

For example using the pipe character:

lftp -c 'connect sftp://user_name:password@host_name/directory; ls -l | wc -l'

This will make lftp spawn a local wc -l and give it the output of the remote ls -l ftp command on its stdin.

Shell redirection syntax is also supported and will write directly to local files:

lftp -c 'connect sftp://user_name:password@host_name/directory; ls -l >list.txt'

Thus a file named list.txt containing the remote file listing will be created in the current folder on the local machine. Use >> to append instead.

Works perfectly for me.

Answer 2

echo ls -l | sftp server | grep -v '^sftp' | wc -l

If you want to count the files in a directory the directory path should be put after the ls -l command like

echo ls -l /my/directory/ | sftp server | grep -v '^sftp' | wc -l

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

I would use sftp batch file. Create a file called batchfile and enter "ls -l" in it. Then run

sftp -b batchfile user@sftpHost | wc -l