How to get the length of a variable in bash?

Question

I currently have something of the form

abc=`find ~/$folder .. etc

I'd like to know how to get the number of items in abc:

abc_length = ?

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you mean by "items", so I will assume "directory entries". Assuming you have no files with newlines in their name, echo "$abc" | wc -l will do the trick.

If you want to count the number of characters, use wc -c instead.

Answer 2

Use array:

abc=( $(find ...) )
abc_length=${#abc[@]}

Retrieve n-th result, say 10th:

echo ${abc[9]}

Or list all:

for dir_name in "${abc[@]}"; do
  echo $dir_name
done

---

Update: asker doesn't seem to want to process in script, so:

abc_length=$(find ... | wc -l)

You may want to reduce the number by 1 because the first result is ~/$folder:

abc_length=$(( $(find ... | wc -l) - 1 ))