Question

i would like to know how would you find how many variables are stored in a variable..for example:

dir=$(ls)

dir would store the names of all the files in the directory and i know you can cycle through them with a while-do loop. but is there a way for me to know how many variables (file names in this case) are stored in the variable (dir)?

thanks

Answer 1

A clean way would be to use bash arrays.

dir=($(ls))

EDIT: The above does not handle spaces properly, see Glenn’s answer for the correct way, which still creates a bash array:

dir=(*)

Notice the additional braces above. i.e. I declared dir to be an array, rather than a single variable.

Then you can simply get the number of elements in dir (the array):

echo ${#dir[@]}

You can access the individual elements:

echo ${dir[0]}
echo ${dir[5]}

More details here: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/arrays.html