How to display number of items in a folder - Bash - bash

Question

When I execute the ls -l -h command, I get an output as show by the image below.
How can the number of the items in a folder be included in the output?
Update
The current output looks like this
total 41M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41M Dec 20 09:56 completed_projects.bson
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 213 Dec 20 09:57 completed_projects.metadata.json
drwxrwxr-x 2 adipster adipster 4.0K Jun 16 13:22 contents
-rw-rw-r-- 1 adipster adipster 13 Jun 16 13:20 file.py
drwxrwxr-x 4 adipster adipster 4.0K Jun 16 13:22 folder
drwxrwxr-x 2 adipster adipster 4.0K Jun 16 13:21 items
But I'll like to have another column indicating the number of items in a folder like this
total 41M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41M Dec 20 09:56 completed_projects.bson
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 213 Dec 20 09:57 completed_projects.metadata.json
drwxrwxr-x 2 adipster adipster 4.0K Jun 16 13:22 contents 235
-rw-rw-r-- 1 adipster adipster 13 Jun 16 13:20 file.py
drwxrwxr-x 4 adipster adipster 4.0K Jun 16 13:22 folder 19
drwxrwxr-x 2 adipster adipster 4.0K Jun 16 13:21 items 5
where the numbers at the extreme right represents the number of items in a folder

Answer 1

You can do something like this:
echo -n "Number of files in folder is: " && ls | wc -l && ls -l
ouptut should be something like this:
umber of files in folder is: 3
Total 279K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user users 19K Jun 16 00:17 a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user users 5K Jun 16 00:17 b
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user users 255K Jun 16 00:17 c
You can omit echo statement, just as a note -n is no new line flag.

Answer 2

sed has an option to execute the constructed replacement with /e.
We only count subdirs, looking at the first character
ls -l | sed -r 's/d(.*) ([^ ]*)/printf "d%s %-20s%s\n" "\1" \2 $(ls \2| wc -l)/e'
EDIT: Solution for directories with spaces in their name.
Parsing ls should be avoided. When you try to fix above cmmand for directory names with spaces, you might try
# Don't do this
ls -l | sed -r 's/d(.{,48}) (.*)/printf "d%s %-20s%s\n" "\1" "\2" $(ls "\2"| wc -l)/e'
It is time to write a script. Perhaps with find or something like
#/bin/bash
for i in *; do
printf "%-70s %s\n" "$(/bin/ls -ld "$i")" "$(/bin/ls -d "$i"/* 2>/dev/null| wc -l)"
done
The wc in the subdir will count wrong when filenames have newlines.

Answer 3

ls() { command ls "$#" | tee >(echo "$(wc -l) items"); }
That uses an output process substitution to run the little "echo" script on its stdin while also displaying stdin (thanks to tee). This way, you don't have to run ls twice.
Usual caveat: output will be incorrect when there's a file with a newline in the name.