in reply to Using Perl saves time....

One thing the ls does that the perl code does not is sort the output. My linux system supports ls -U to leave the list unsorted: if there are that many files this may fix the speed issue.

Hugo

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Re^2: Using Perl saves time....
by hakkr (Chaplain) on Jul 18, 2005 at 16:21 UTC
    more than one nix way to do it ;) 
    'nl *'

    [download]
    update removed redundant cat *
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[d/l]

      nl - the line numbering utility takes one or more file names on its command line. So nl * cats the contents of all the files with line numers.

      46$ ls | wc
      15      15     233

47$ nl * | wc
     857    3540   29899

48$ ls | nl
     1  Makefile
     2  RCS
     3  Tests
     4 
     ...
    15

      [download]

      But you just want the count, not the list, so you would need to | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f1.

      Or to be precise: ls | nl | tr -s ' ' ' ' | tr "\t" ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2

      --
      TTTATCGGTCGTTATATAGATGTTTGCA

[reply]
[d/l]
      Hm, I think with this glob the shell will first try to put all filenames on your commandline. If you have a lot of files, the maximum size for a command line will be exceeded (this maximum can be pretty large on *nix machines, but the OP intended to count lots of files...).
[reply]

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