SFTP: return number of files in remote directory?

Question

I sent a batch of files to a remote server via SFTP. If it were a local directory I could do something like this ls -l | wc -l to get the total number of files. However, with SFTP, I get an error Can't ls: "/|" not found.

Answer 1

echo ls -l | sftp server | grep -v '^sftp' | wc -l

If you want to count the files in a directory the directory path should be put after the ls -l command like

echo ls -l /my/directory/ | sftp server | grep -v '^sftp' | wc -l