How do I count all the files that begin with letters from a to g?

Question

I have a question concerning linux commands. How do I count all the files that begin with letters from a to g?

Answer 1

LC_ALL=C
set -- [a-gA-G]*
if [ "$1" = '[a-gA-G]*' ]; then
  echo 0
else
  echo "$#"
fi          

Answer 2

You can do it with a one-line shell command:

find / -name '[abcedfg]*' -print | wc -l

You will see some messages about how find doesn't have permission to read some directory or another, but you will get a count of files whose names begin with those 7 letters.

Answer 3

GNU find can do that for you:

find ./ -type f -maxdepth 1 -iname "[a-g]*" 2> /dev/null | wc -l

this finds all files (not directories) under ./ but digs into no further directories and matches the name (case insensitive) of the file beginning with "a-g", redirects all errors to /dev/null and then counts the files

Answer 4

The GNU implementation of the ls command (which you are using since you are running Linux) will find all files in the current directory starting with a character a-g.

ls --ignore='[!a-g]*'

It tells to ignore all files that do not start with a character in the range [a-g]. The ! inverts the filter. * indicat

Next run the output through wc -l to count the lines.

The full command will thus be:

ls --ignore='[!a-g]*' | wc -l

This solution will not recurs into subdirectories.

Answer 5

ls -1 [a-g]* | wc -l

Why do it like this? Because you probably want the simplest answer; this one assumes you don't have to worry about not counting directories, nor searching sub-directories, nor upper-case filenames... and this is the command I most often use.