How to count the lines of a file?

−0

How to get the number of lines in a file?

I.e. for a file like this:

Line one
Line 2
Final line

I would like to do something like this:

$ count-lines /path/to/the/file/above
3

shell file

posted 9 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

9mo ago

Iizuki‭

610 reputation 27 32 80 17

Raw

Markdown

History

is a duplicate

This question has been asked before and has already been answered. It should be marked as a duplicate.

Please enter the URL of the proposed duplicate in the details field below.

not constructive

This question cannot be answered in a way that is helpful to anyone. It's not possible to learn something from possible answers, except for the solution for the specific problem of the asker.

0 comment threads

2 answers

Score Active Age

You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.

−0

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

Copy Link

Raw

Markdown

History

0 comment threads

−0

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

Copy Link

Raw

Markdown

History

1 comment thread

Newline characters (2 comments)

Communities

How to count the lines of a file?

0 comment threads

2 answers

0 comment threads

1 comment thread