Re: question about ls

[Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org>]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 08:53:28AM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> On Thu 27 Sep 2018 at 07:55:56 (-0500), Kent West wrote:
> > westk@westkbox:/opt$ ls -la | wc
> >      7      56     321
> > westk@westkbox:/opt$ ls -1a | wc
> >      6       6      54
> 
> But do use 1A, not 1a, if you want to know how many items are
> in a folder, otherwise . and .. will be included in the count.

All of the above give the wrong answers when filenames contain newlines.
Any solution that involves printing the filenames to a stream and then
trying to parse that stream to guess how many filenames are in the stream
is a non-starter -- unless of course the stream uses NUL delimiters
instead of newlines.

Sadly, the GNU coreutils maintainers have rejected every request, even
requests with patches attached, to add a --null option to ls.  So,
ls is not suited to this task.