How to count the lines of a file?

I think the typical way to do this uses wc ("word count") with the -l ("lines") option.

$ wc -l /path/to/file
    47 /path/to/file

$ wc -l </path/to/file
47

$ cat /path/to/file | wc -l
47

wc with no options prints the number of lines, words, and bytes, but -l can limit it to just lines. As a comment notes: "lines" is the number of newline characters, so you may be off-by-one if you don't have a trailing newline.

posted 9 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

7mo ago

Michael‭

231 reputation 1 9 24 36

One way is to use grep:

$ grep --count ^ /path/to/the/file

The ^ character matches a start of a new line, so it basically counts the number of starting lines.

posted 9 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Iizuki‭

610 reputation 27 32 80 17