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Asked: 2026-05-14T05:44:36+00:00

This is my first Bash script so forgive me if this question is trivial.

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This is my first Bash script so forgive me if this question is trivial. I need to count the number of files within a specified directory $HOME/.junk. I thought this would be simple and assumed the following would work:

numfiles= find $HOME/.junk -type f | wc -l
echo "There are $numfiles files in the .junk directory."

Typing find $HOME/.junk -type f | wc -l at the command line works exactly how I expected it to, simply returning the number of files. Why is this not working when it is entered within my script? Am I missing some special notation when it comes to passing options to the utilities?

Thank you very much for your time and help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You just need to surround it with backticks:

    numfiles=`find $HOME/.junk -type f | wc -l`

    The term for this is command substitution.

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