bug#79710: [PATCH] ls: add --count and --count-list options to display file, directory, and symlink counts and counts with list of contents

[Paul Eggert]

On 2025-10-28 19:55, Debkanta Mondal wrote:
  While ls |
wc -l gives a quick total, it’s not reliable
when filenames contain newlines

Neither does ls --count, right? Because file names with newlines can 
contain substrings that look like counts (this would be particularly a 
problem with ls -R). Plus, such file names are so rare, and POSIX plans 
to outlaw them, and if you care about them anyway you can use ls --zero, 
and so forth.

Things might be different if this was a common need that 'ls | wc' 
didn't satisfy, but I don't see it.