Difficulty with wc

Hi,

wc -l

does give a result with leading blanks. This makes it difficult to work 
with the result in scripts, like:
N=$(ls | wc -l)
to know the number of entries in a directory.

I now get arround it with sed - but it seems quite uncomfortable to 
invoke another time consuming program just to "clean up" a simple result.

Regards
Hearp