How to count lines in a document?

1250

votes

I have lines like these, and I want to know how many lines I actually have...

09:16:39 AM  all    2.00    0.00    4.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   94.00
09:16:40 AM  all    5.00    0.00    0.00    4.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   91.00
09:16:41 AM  all    0.00    0.00    4.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   96.00
09:16:42 AM  all    3.00    0.00    1.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   96.00
09:16:43 AM  all    0.00    0.00    1.00    0.00    1.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   98.00
09:16:44 AM  all    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00  100.00
09:16:45 AM  all    2.00    0.00    6.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   92.00

Is there a way to count them all using linux commands?

linuxbashcommand-linescripting

Open file using vim, then type g <Ctrl-g>, It will show you number of lines, words, columns and bytes – Luv33preet

2321

votes

Use wc:

wc -l <filename>

This will output the number of lines in <filename>:

$ wc -l /dir/file.txt
3272485 /dir/file.txt

Or, to omit the <filename> from the result use wc -l < <filename>:

$ wc -l < /dir/file.txt
3272485

You can also pipe data to wc as well:

$ cat /dir/file.txt | wc -l
3272485
$ curl yahoo.com --silent | wc -l
63

157

votes

To count all lines use:

$ wc -l file

To filter and count only lines with pattern use:

$ grep -w "pattern" -c file

Or use -v to invert match:

$ grep -w "pattern" -c -v file

See the grep man page to take a look at the -e,-i and -x args...

81

votes

wc -l <file.txt>

Or

command | wc -l

53

votes

there are many ways. using wc is one.

wc -l file

others include

awk 'END{print NR}' file

sed -n '$=' file (GNU sed)

grep -c ".*" file

29

votes

The tool wc is the "word counter" in UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, but you can also use it to count lines in a file by adding the -l option.

wc -l foo will count the number of lines in foo. You can also pipe output from a program like this: ls -l | wc -l, which will tell you how many files are in the current directory (plus one).

27

votes

If you want to check the total line of all the files in a directory ,you can use find and wc:

find . -type f -exec wc -l {} +

24

votes

Use wc:

wc -l <filename>

16

votes

If all you want is the number of lines (and not the number of lines and the stupid file name coming back):

wc -l < /filepath/filename.ext

As previously mentioned these also work (but are inferior for other reasons):

awk 'END{print NR}' file       # not on all unixes
sed -n '$=' file               # (GNU sed) also not on all unixes
grep -c ".*" file              # overkill and probably also slower

15

votes

`wc -l` does not count lines.

Yes, this answer may be a bit late to the party, but I haven't found anyone document a more robust solution in the answers yet.

Contrary to popular belief, POSIX does not require files to end with a newline character at all. Yes, the definition of a POSIX 3.206 Line is as follows:

A sequence of zero or more non- <newline> characters plus a terminating character.

However, what many people are not aware of is that POSIX also defines POSIX 3.195 Incomplete Line as:

A sequence of one or more non- <newline> characters at the end of the file.

Hence, files without a trailing LF are perfectly POSIX-compliant.

If you choose not to support both EOF types, your program is not POSIX-compliant.

As an example, let's have look at the following file.

1 This is the first line.
2 This is the second line.

No matter the EOF, I'm sure you would agree that there are two lines. You figured that out by looking at how many lines have been started, not by looking at how many lines have been terminated. In other words, as per POSIX, these two files both have the same amount of lines:

1 This is the first line.\n
2 This is the second line.\n

1 This is the first line.\n
2 This is the second line.

The man page is relatively clear about wc counting newlines, with a newline just being a 0x0a character:

NAME
       wc - print newline, word, and byte counts for each file

Hence, wc doesn't even attempt to count what you might call a "line". Using wc to count lines can very well lead to miscounts, depending on the EOF of your input file.

POSIX-compliant solution

You can use grep to count lines just as in the example above. This solution is both more robust and precise, and it supports all the different flavors of what a line in your file could be:

$ grep -c ^ FILE

10

votes

Use nl like this:

nl filename

From man nl:

Write each FILE to standard output, with line numbers added. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

8

votes

I've been using this:

cat myfile.txt | wc -l

I prefer it over the accepted answer because it does not print the filename, and you don't have to use awk to fix that. Accepted answer:

wc -l myfile.txt

But I think the best one is GGB667's answer:

wc -l < myfile.txt

I will probably be using that from now on. It's slightly shorter than my way. I am putting up my old way of doing it in case anyone prefers it. The output is the same with those two methods.

6

votes

Above are the preferred method but "cat" command can also helpful:

cat -n <filename>

Will show you whole content of file with line numbers.

5

votes

I saw this question while I was looking for a way to count multiple files lines, so if you want to count multiple file lines of a .txt file you can do this,

cat *.txt | wc -l

it will also run on one .txt file ;)

4

votes

cat file.log | wc -l | grep -oE '\d+'

grep -oE '\d+': In order to return the digit numbers ONLY.

3

votes

wc -l file.txt | cut -f3 -d" "

Returns only the number of lines

3

votes

Redirection/Piping the output of the file to wc -l should suffice, like the following:

cat /etc/fstab | wc -l

which then would provide the no. of lines only.

3

votes

Or count all lines in subdirectories with a file name pattern (e.g. logfiles with timestamps in the file name):

wc -l ./**/*_SuccessLog.csv

3

votes

count number of lines and store result in variable use this command:

count=$(wc -l < file.txt) echo "Number of lines: $count"

2

votes

I know this is old but still: Count filtered lines

My file looks like:

Number of files sent
Company 1 file: foo.pdf OK
Company 1 file: foo.csv OK
Company 1 file: foo.msg OK
Company 2 file: foo.pdf OK
Company 2 file: foo.csv OK
Company 2 file: foo.msg Error
Company 3 file: foo.pdf OK
Company 3 file: foo.csv OK
Company 3 file: foo.msg Error
Company 4 file: foo.pdf OK
Company 4 file: foo.csv OK
Company 4 file: foo.msg Error

If I want to know how many files are sent OK:

grep "OK" <filename> | wc -l

OR

grep -c "OK" filename

2

votes

wc -l <filename>

This will give you number of lines and filename in output.

Eg.

wc -l 24-11-2019-04-33-01-url_creator.log

Output

63 24-11-2019-04-33-01-url_creator.log

Use

wc -l <filename>|cut -d\ -f 1

to get only number of lines in output.

Eg.

wc -l 24-11-2019-04-33-01-url_creator.log|cut -d\ -f 1

Output

63

2

votes

This drop-in portable shell function ^[ℹ] works like a charm. Just add the following snippet to your .bashrc file (or the equivalent for your shell environment).

# ---------------------------------------------
#  Count lines in a file
#
#  @1 = path to file
#
#  EXAMPLE USAGE: `count_file_lines $HISTFILE`
# ---------------------------------------------
count_file_lines() {
    local subj=$(wc -l $1)
    subj="${subj//$1/}"
    echo ${subj//[[:space:]]}
}

This should be fully compatible with all POSIX-compliant shells in addition to bash and zsh.

1

votes

As others said wc -l is the best solution, but for future reference you can use Perl:

perl -lne 'END { print $. }'

$. contains line number and END block will execute at the end of script.

1

votes

I just made a program to do this ( with node )

npm install gimme-lines
gimme-lines verbose --exclude=node_modules,public,vendor --exclude_extensions=html

https://github.com/danschumann/gimme-lines/tree/master

0

votes

wc -l file_name

for eg: wc -l file.txt

it will give you the total number of lines in that file

for getting last line use tail -1 file_name

0

votes

I tried wc -l to get the number of line from the file name

To do more filtering for example want to count to the number of commented lines from the file use grep '#' Filename.txt | wc -l

echo  "No of files in the file $FILENAME"
wc -l < $FILENAME
echo total number of commented lines
echo $FILENAME
grep '#' $FILENAME | wc -l

0

votes

if you're on some sort of BSD-based system like macOS, i'd recommend the gnu version of wc. It doesn't trip up on certain binary files the way BSD wc does. At least it's still somewhat usable performance. On the other hand, BSD tail is slow as ............zzzzzzzzzz...........

As for AWK, only a minor caveat though - since it operates under the default assumption of lines, meaning \n, if your file just happens not to have a trailing new line delimiter, AWK will over count it by 1 compared to either BSD or GNU wc. Also, if you're piping in things with no new lines at all, such as echo -n, depending on whether you're measuring at the END { } section or FNR==1, the NR will be different.

0

votes

Awk saves lives (and lines too):

awk '{c++};END{print c}' < file

If you want to make sure you are not counting empty lines, you can do:

awk '{/^./ && c++};END{print c}' < file

How to count lines in a document?

27 Answers

wc -l does not count lines.

POSIX-compliant solution

`wc -l` does not count lines.