COUNT(1)

✨ COUNT 💅 (fish-shell manual, bestie edition)

okay so you're here for count from the fish-shell manual — periodt, let's go 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

count — literally just counts how many elements are in a list, that's the whole gig 💖

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

count STRING1 STRING2 ...
COMMAND | count
count [...] < FILE

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so count prints the number of arguments that were passed to it, plus the number of newlines that got passed to it via stdin. that's it, that's the vibe 🫶

most of the time you're using this to find out how many elements an environment variable list contains, or how many lines there are in a text file. very demure, very useful.

🚨 heads up bestie: count does not accept any options. not even -h or --help. it's giving "no thoughts, head empty, just numbers" — do not try it, it will not slay 😭

here's the exit status tea ☕: count exits with a non-zero exit status if no arguments were passed to it, and with zero if at least one argument was passed. so no args = sad girl hours, one arg = we're so back 💅

also, note that, like wc -l, reading from stdin counts newlines, so echo -n foo | count will print 0. yes really. no newline, no count, no cap 🌈

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🎀 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'.

git ls-files --others --exclude-standard | count
# Returns the number of untracked files in a git repository

printf '%s\n' foo bar | count baz
# Returns 3 (2 lines from stdin plus 1 argument)

count < /etc/hosts
# Counts the number of entries in the hosts file

see? iconic. every single one of these is a main character move 👑

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👑 Copyright

fish-shell developers 🐟

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okay that's the whole page, bestie — go forth and count things 🦋💜

sign-off szn: this was count from fish-shell, version 4.9, dated Sep 08, 2026 — noting it here in the cute lil footer way instead of pasting the boring footer line, iykyk 🎀✨🔥