I have the following alias defined in my .bashrc
alias lsfc='ls -l "$@" | tee /dev/tty | grep -v / | echo "File count: `wc -l`"'
which is intended to give me the number of files in a directory but is giving me that number +1 - because it's also including the initial line giving the total size of the directory. How can I modify my alias to either exclude that first line or reduce the line count by one? I can't even begin to work out what to Google for to try and solve this on my own.
Aliases don't use or even understand parameters such as "$@", so immediately you will need to use a function or script. Here's one implementation:
lsfc() {
local x=$(ls -lq -- "$@" );
local n=$(wc -l <<<"$x");
printf "%s\nFile count: %d\n" "$x" "$((n-1))"
}
Be aware that the "file" count is actually a count of the lines from ls less one. So if you have a pathological file name that contains a newline ls -l will count twice. Here we did this by including the -q flag (see man ls, GNU versions in particular)
grep -v /. If you're using external utilities, you could just as well do zsh -c 'set -- *(D^/); echo $#' (counts and outputs number of non-directories in the current directory, including hidden files (the D)).
| awk '( $1 ~ "^[dlnspcb-][rwxXst-]{9}" && $2 ~ "^[1-9][0-9]*$" ) { sum+=1 }; END { print sum }'
Commented
Sep 18 at 15:51
In addition to Chris's good advice to use a function, Don't parse ls
Use stat to get statistics about files:
lsfc() {
ls -lq -- "$@"
printf 'File count: %d\n' "$(stat -c '%F' "$@" | grep -cF 'regular file')"
}
GNU stat understands the -c option. Check your stat man page.
... Although, depending on your positional parameters, ls and stat may interpret "$@" differently.
lsfc is expected to get a list of directory paths and list their contents, but you're stating those directories instead of the files they contain. The OP's grep -v / also suggests they have an alias that adds the -F or -p option.
Commented
Sep 18 at 15:52
-lif you don't want the information it prints. Or remove the first line with e.g.sed 1d. Or use the shell's arithmetic expansion to subtract one,$(( $(wc -l) - 1 )). But also note that if someone gives you a filename with a newline in it (something unix-like OSes sadly don't stop you from doing), some versions oflswill happily print it with a raw newline, messing up the count. Anyway, you should probably turn that into a shell function too, in particular because"$@"doesn't even work in an alias the way you'd hope it does.