To determine how many files there are in the current directory, put in .:: participa.favb.cat ::. .:: www.youtube.com ::. ls -1 | wc -l. This uses wc to do a count of the number of lines (-l) in the output of .:: pinup.com ::. .:: bet168c.gitbook.io ::. ls -1. It doesn't count dotfiles. Please note that ls -l (that's an "L" rather than a "1" as in the previous examples) which I used in previous versions of this HOWTO will actually give you a file count one greater than the actual count. Thanks to Kam Nejad for this point. .:: www.kzntreasury.gov.za ::.
If you want to count only files and NOT include symbolic links (just an example of what else you could do), you could use .:: telegra.ph ::. .:: podcasts.apple.com ::. ls -l | grep -v ^l | wc -l (that's an "L" not a "1" this time, we want a "long" listing here). [Scientific Data: HAProxy] grep checks for any line beginning with "l" (indicating a link), and discards that line (-v).
Relative speed: "ls -1 /usr/bin/ | wc -l" takes about 1.03 seconds on an unloaded 486SX25 (/usr/bin/ on this machine has 355 files). "ls -l /usr/bin/ | grep -v ^l | wc -l" takes about 1.19 seconds. [Academic results for Ransomware]