Counts files in the current directory and subdirectory

That fails on some systems where there are files or directories with spaces in their names.

Try instead:

alias lll='find . | wc -l'

if you want only the file count and not the directories stick to:

alias lll='find . -type f | wc -l'

unfortunately that also has a problem with filenames containing newlines (which are valid) in any case Techfun's implementation is not the same as the first one, Techfun's gives a total of the files while the original provides counts per directory.

this, as usual, can be better and more efficiently implemented by the shell alone:

 lll() (
     f() {
         local files=0 dirs=()
         for dir_entry in "$1"/*; do
             [[ -d $dir_entry ]] && dirs+=("$dir_entry") || let "files++"
         done
         echo "$files $1"
         for dirname in "${dirs[@]}"; do
             f "$dirname"
         done
     }
     shopt -u failglob dotglob
     shopt -s nullglob
     f "${1:-$PWD}"
 )

notice the use of parenthesis instead of braces on the outer body to avoid corrupting the environment by changing the glob settings.