Count Lines From Standard Input in Shell

Here’s a script that will help you count the lines of input from the standard input:

result=0
while read inputline
do
	result=`expr $result + 1`
done
echo $result

Now, you can find out the number of files in a directory using:

ls -1 | count

Update

As Jeff Harver has kindly pointed out in the comments, the same thing as the long script above can be accomplished using:

ls | wc -l