running the system command ls-l in an awk script

[Musquo]

What I am trying to do is get a number of directory files in my current directory.

Here is a copy of my script and output

BEGIN {
print "The following are directory files"
}
{
system( "ls-l " )
}
END {
print "There were " NR " directories in this list."
}
What hapens is the BEGIN prints out the sstatement. Then the script is waiting for some input and I have to doa CTR-D to stop the script from running

Thanks for your help

 

[grega]

Do you need to use awk? A shell command to do the same job would be something like

echo "There were`ls -l|wc -l|tr -s \" \"` directories in this list"

Bear in mind ls -l|wc -l will always report 1 more file than there actually is because of the header line.

Greg.

 

[Musquo]

Yes I do need to use AWK because I am studying that in my UNIX I class.

Thanks

 

[marsd]

awk '
function dirlist() {
while (("ls -l" | getline array[a++]) > 0) {
}
for (x=1 ; x <= a ; x++) {
print array[x]
}
}

BEGIN {
dirlist()
}'