CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxshell
Teddy13
Teddy13

Reputation: 3854

Going through each ls line

I am new to shell scripting in linux. I want to be able to list the number of files in my directory, the number of directories in the directory and so fourth. I have decided to go upon this task by using

   ls -l | cut -c1-1

So this way I can get the first character of every ls command and then based on what it is, keep a count of file type until all files are listed. So an example would be if I was in a folder with a bunch of files and did the cut command from above, it would display many "-" permissions indicating it was a file.

My question is this, based on the command above, how would I go through each ls line? If I enter the command from above in the shell, it simply displays all of them at once... I would like to go through each ls line.

Thanks!

Directory is called Test and contains

 -rw-r--r--  1 teddy  user  31 27 Mar 10:07 test1.txt
 drwx------  1 teddy  user   9 30 Jan 19:18 tooney
 -rw-r--r--  1 teddy  user  31 27 Mar 10:07 test2.txt
 drwx------  1 teddy  user   9  21 Mar 11:32 dirt

Upvotes: 0

Views: 110

Answers (3)

FatalError
FatalError

Reputation: 54551

Using your method, you can calculate the totals using uniq, for example:

$ ls -l | cut -c1-1 | sort | uniq -c
    214 -
     13 d
      2 l
      1 t

uniq -c counts the number of consecutive occurrences of a line, and sort just puts them into some sorted order so that the same types end up together.

If you want these results in variables, then something this would be easier:

dirs=0
files=0

for name in *
do
    if [[ -d "$name" ]]
    then
        ((dirs++))
    elif [[ -f "$name" ]]
    then
        ((files++))
    # Possibly other things you want to count ...
    fi
done

echo "Files: $files"
echo "Directories: $dirs"

Upvotes: 3

Mike Gardner
Mike Gardner

Reputation: 6651

Piping the command into more will keep it from scrolling off the screen.

ls -l | cut -c1-1 | more

Upvotes: 0

Chris Seymour
Chris Seymour

Reputation: 85795

How about using find and wc:

# Find all files in the current directory 
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l

# Find all directories in the current directory 
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l

The command wc (word count) can be used to count the number of character, words and lines. Here wc -l counts the number of lines output from the results of find.

Upvotes: 4

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