Calculating the number of lines in a file?

Question

How would I calculate and display the number of lines and words that are contained in a .sh file?

score 162 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 06 '24 at 06:39

162

Use the program wc.

See man wc for more options.

edited Jan 06 '24 at 06:39

unrealapex

answered Apr 03 '14 at 15:09

sourav c.

3

Be aware that the documentation says: "print the newline counts" when using the -l option, so if your file have three lines (two \n), thus, wc -l myfile.sh will return 2. – ViniciusArruda Feb 17 '22 at 14:36

Aaron · Answer 2 · 2016-01-07T14:59:23.220

31

As mentioned by souravc, you can use wc for this:

$ wc -w statusToFiles.sh 
10 statusToFiles.sh
$ wc -l statusToFiles.sh 
6 statusToFiles.sh

To only display the count itself, you can pipe that output to awk, like this:

$ wc -l statusToFiles.sh | awk '{ print $1 }'
6

...or as kos mentioned below:

$ < statusToFiles.sh wc -l
6

edited Jan 07 '16 at 14:59

answered Jan 07 '16 at 14:42

Aaron

score 21 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 11 '19 at 15:13

21

You can use grep command with blank matching string

grep "" -c file_path

answered Sep 11 '19 at 15:13

andreykyz

2

Why does this is answer not have more upvotes? Is there something fishy about it? It works like a charm for me and the code looks very simple. – Felix Crazzolara Nov 02 '19 at 11:04
1

or with non-blank matching string if you want to count non-empty lines grep -c . file (The period . matches any single character.) – jakun May 29 '20 at 16:01
1

@FelixCrazzolara because the wc -l command is three times faster – Hannibal Aug 26 '22 at 20:06
1

@Hannibal but grep use frequently and easy to remember – andreykyz Sep 02 '22 at 15:04
This worked for me as I was not able to use wc – Robert Dundon Sep 26 '23 at 20:57

score 8 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 07 '16 at 16:19

8

You can also output the entire file with line numbers in front of every line using the command below:

cat -n myfile

edited Jan 07 '16 at 16:19

Byte Commander

answered Jan 07 '16 at 14:17

imad

This is useless for big files (e.g. 250MB), instead it may causing freeze – user2342558 Jun 29 '20 at 12:39

4 Answers4