Hello @Paul Eggert Sir, I have understood your point - filenames with newlines are rare, and ls --count wouldn’t change that limitation. I don't know if I am going in the right direction or not as per GNU coreutils philosophy and POSIX. But my idea is mainly to provide a simple, built-in summary of files, dirs, and links, using data ls already collects, so users don’t need to pipe through wc or find for a simple quick overview.
I understand the concern about adding too many options in ls; I’ll consider whether this functionality fits better as a small external tool. Thanks again for the review and consideration! Signed-off-by: Debkanta Mondal ([email protected]) On Wed, Oct 29, 2025 at 8:42 AM Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
