I had a directory with number of files and need to check the count of files present in it.
I tried the following two commands:
ls | wc -l ls -l | wc -l
and found there are differences while using both commands. (ie. number of files is greater in the usage of second command while comparing to the first command.)
I would like to know the changes happening in the both commands.
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Answer
From man ls
:
-l (The lowercase letter ``ell''.) List in long format. (See below.) If the output is to a terminal, a total sum for all the file sizes is output on a line before the long listing.
So ls -l
adds a header line stating the “total” size of files:
$ ls -l / total 65 -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6197 May 11 21:57 COPYRIGHT drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1024 Jun 1 16:02 bin drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 1536 Jun 1 16:02 boot dr-xr-xr-x 8 root wheel 512 Jul 7 20:16 dev .......