man count (Commandes) - .SH "count - Count the number of elements of an array"

NAME

count - .SH "count - Count the number of elements of an array"

Synopsis

count $VARIABLE

Description

count returns the number of arguments that were passed to it. This is usually used to find out how many elements an environment variable array contains, but this is not the only potential usage for the count command.

The count command does not accept any options, not even '-h'. This way the user does not have to worry about an array containing elements such as dashes. fish performs a special check when invoking the count program, and if the user uses a help option, this help page is displayed, but if a help option is contained inside of a variable or is the result of expansion, it will be passed on to the count program.

Example

count $PATH

returns the number of directories in the users PATH variable.

count *.txt

returns the number of files in the current working directory ending with the suffix '.txt'.