8

When displaying directories using ls -l, their number of links (the second field in the output) is at least two: one for the dir name and one for . 

$ mkdir foo
$ ls -l
total 2
drwxr-xr-x  2 user   wheel  512  4 oct 14:02 foo

Is it safe to always assume that the number of links above 2 corresponds to the number of subdirectories in this dir (.. links) ?

Eugene Yarmash
  • 15,095

5 Answers5

7

It is usually true on unix systems that the number of links to a directory is the number of subdirectories plus 2. However there are cases where this is not true:

  • Some unices allow hard links to directories. Then there will be more than 2 links that do not correspond to subdirectories.

  • There are filesystems where directories do not have entries for . and ... The GNU find manual mentions some examples in the discussion of its -noleaf option (which disables an optimization that assumes that . and .. exist in all directories): “CD-ROM or MS-DOS filesystems or AFS volume mount points”

An almost reliable way to count the number of subdirectories (it may still fail if a file name contains a newline character) is

$(($(LC_ALL=C ls -la /path/to/directory | grep '^d' | wc -l) - 2)

A more reliable way uses shell globs */ and .*/; as usual handling the case where the pattern doesn't match is a bit of a pain (except in bash and zsh where you can turn on the nullglob option).

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
  • 829,060
2

Here's yet another way to count subdirectories (non-recursively) in Bash:

(
shopt -s nullglob dotglob
printf '%s\000' */ | tr -dc '\0' | wc -c  # wc counts null bytes
)

Because each file name is being terminated by an ASCII NUL character, this should work correctly even if a file name contains a newline character.

matt
  • 21
  • 1
2

You could try with:

ls -l |grep ^d | wc -l
don_crissti
  • 82,805
HandyGandy
  • 2,209
1

Don't use ls for this. Here's one way which works with all filenames, even those containing newlines, because it prints only a newline character instead of the filename:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf '\n' | wc -l

Edit: The current version doesn't result in any warnings, because -mindepth and -maxdepth should be before -type (the directory tree is pruned before checking for directories, to save time).

l0b0
  • 51,350
1

I can't find anything in the documentation that confirms that the number of links will always be +2 on the number of subdirectories.

But, to find the correct ammount, use:

find . -type d -mindepth 1  -maxdepth 1 | wc -l

Or if you have to use ls -l, see the other answer.

Stefan
  • 25,300