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 seems odd to me and am wondering if there is a simpler way of doing it.

I have commented out the code that will work, but left it in as a comparison. I am trying to get the for-loop working, instead using if statements inside it to detect if an item in the given location is a file or a directory.

Edit: I just found out that the commented code counts all files and directories in the subdirectories of the given location as well! Is there any way to prevent this and just count the files and directories of the given location?

#!/bin/bash

LOCATION=$1
FILECOUNT=0
DIRCOUNT=0

if [ "$#" -lt "1" ]
then
    echo "Usage: ./test2.sh <directory>"
    exit 0
fi

#DIRS=$(find $LOCATION -type d)
#FILES=$(find $LOCATION -type f)

#for d in $DIRS
#do
#   DIRCOUNT=$[$DIRCOUNT+1]
#done

#for f in $FILES
#do
#   FILECOUNT=$[$FILECOUNT+1]
#done

for item in $LOCATION
do
if [ -f "$item" ]
    then
         FILECOUNT=$[$FILECOUNT+1]
    elif [ -d "$item" ]
        then
         DIRCOUNT=$[$DIRCOUNT+1]
fi
done

echo "File count: " $FILECOUNT
echo "Directory count: " $DIRCOUNT

For some reason the output of the for-loop, no matter where I point the location to, always returns:

File count: 0 , Directory count: 1

Answer 1

You’re not iterating over the list of files inside the given directory; add /* after $LOCATION. Your script should look like:

...
for item in $LOCATION/*
do
...

As pointed by dogbane, just adding /* will count only files that does not begin with .; for doing so, you shall do the following:

...
for item in $LOCATION/* $LOCATION/.*
do
...