I have a directory with lots of files.
How can I find out by the size of meta data reported by ls
drwxr-x--- 2 www-data www-data 1017M Aug 8 10:44 cookies_
How many files are in the directory.
I do not want to count them (even in Determining number of files in a directory without counting them there are counting them)
You can’t, for a number of reasons.
The first is that a directory’s size grows, but it doesn’t shrink (on most file systems anyway). Try this:
mkdir testdir && cd testdir
touch {1..100000}
rm {1..100000}
ls -ld ../testdir
This will produce a fairly large directory (nothing like yours admittedly, but that’s irrelevant here) containing no files...
The second is that in most cases, file records inside a directory entry are variable in length, depending on the file’s name. See for example the ext4 disk layout.
The third is that the directory might not even be linear, which complicates matters further.
The fourth is that a directory’s size is a multiple of the block size, so a directory with one file and a directory with twenty will usually have the same size.
ls -aldis equivalent tols -ld— thedoption makes theaoption irrelevant. – Scott - Слава Україні Aug 08 '17 at 18:52man ls-a, --all: do not ignore entries starting with . -d, --directory: list directory entries instead of contents, and do not dereference symbolic links – jrw32982 Aug 10 '17 at 02:32-dmeans list directory entries instead of contents, or, somewhat more clearly, “list directories themselves, not their contents” (seels(1)here) — in short, *don’t list directory contents, further discussed here and here.-aand-Aaffect which* entries are listed (and which are not) when listing a directory’s contents — which doesn’t happen when you specify-d, so-aand-Aare moot. – Scott - Слава Україні Aug 10 '17 at 02:53ls -aldcame from, but you're right that when you use-dit doesn't seem to help (or hurt) to use-a. – jrw32982 Aug 10 '17 at 17:32