Count files and directories using shell script

Question

I\'m learning bash scripting and have written a script to count the files and directories in the directory that is supplied as argument. I have it working one way which seem

Answer 1

To just solve the problem you can use:

FILECOUNT=$(find $LOCATION -type f | wc -l)
DIRCOUNT=$(find $LOCATION -type d | wc -l)

find will look for all files (-type f) or directories (-type d) recursively under $LOCATION; wc -l will count the number of lines written to stdout in each case.

However if you want to learn, the bash script may be a better way. Some comments:

• If you want to look for files/directories in $LOCATION only (not recursively under their subdirectories etc), you can use for item in $LOCATION/*, where the * will expand to the list of files/directories in the $LOCATION directory. The missing * is why your original script returns 0/1 (becasue the $LOCATION directory itself is the only item counted).
• You may want to check first that $LOCATION is actually a directory with [ -d $LOCATION ].
• For arithmetic expressions, use $(( ... )), for example FILECOUNT=$(( FILECOUNT + 1 )).
• If you want to find all files/directories recursively, you could combine find with a loop.

Example:

find $LOCATION | while read item; do
    # use $item here...
done