Hamza's questions

I want to count the total number of lines in all /etc files but not the files in the sub directories, so I typed: wc -l /etc/* | tail -1 and the output is like:

xxxx is a directory 
yyyy is a directory
total 1752

My question is, how can I rid of (delete) these comments, and is there a better way to do this type of count?

I know that Regular expressions are to be used only with characters and strings, but sometimes I find them in the names of files. My question is: are regexes only used with characters or also with filenames?