Count Files in Directory in Linux

Sometimes you might want to find out the number of files in a given directory. This tutorial covers how to count files in a one directory, not subdirectories. If you want to count files recursively, check this article: Count Files in Directory Recursively in Linux

To accomplish this task, we are going to use ls and pipe it to wc -l which count lines of the input. You should also decide whether to include or exclude hidden files.

Our directory structure in this example is (including hidden files and one subfolder):

$ ls -la
total 60
drwxr-xr-x 3 webadmin apache  4096 Dec 28 16:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 webadmin apache  4096 Dec 28 14:54 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 webadmin apache 29615 Dec 16 14:57 booking.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 webadmin apache    15 Dec 28 14:54 file1.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 webadmin apache    20 Dec 18 14:57 file3.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 webadmin apache     9 Dec 28 16:30 .gitignore
-rw-r-xr-- 1 webadmin apache    22 Jun 14  2019 README.md
drwxr-xr-x 2 webadmin apache  4096 Dec 28 16:30 subfolder

Count Files (excluding hidden files)

$ ls | wc -l
5

Note! Also the subfolder is included in the number.

Count Files (including hidden files)

$ ls -A | wc -l
6

Here the subfolder is included in the number as well, and also the hidden file .gitignore. However . and .. are not included because we used the -A option, not -a which would list also them.