Get first argument of wc -l myFile.txt

Question

I'm counting the number of lines in a big file using

wc -l myFile.txt

Result is

110 myFile.txt

But I want only the number

How can I do that? (I want the number of lines as an input argument in a bash script)

Anthony Geoghegan · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-21T10:55:01.963

3

There are lots of ways to do this. Here are two:

 wc -l myFile.txt | cut -f1 -d' '

 wc -l < myFile.txt

Cut is an old Unix tool to

print selected parts of lines from each FILE to standard output.

edited Apr 21 '15 at 10:55

answered Apr 21 '15 at 10:52

Anthony Geoghegan

1

Glad to see someone using redirection rather than useless use of `awk` – cdarke Apr 21 '15 at 10:54
First command works! The second (non-tls) seems not to be correct: Where should I put "myFile.txt" in that case – mcExchange Apr 21 '15 at 10:58
@mcExchange That was a file I had on my system. I edited my answer a minute after posting when I realised my mistake. – Anthony Geoghegan Apr 21 '15 at 11:01

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 21 '15 at 10:50

1

You can use cat and pipe wc -l:

cat myFile.txt | wc -l

Or if you insist wc -l be the first command, you can use awk:

wc -l myFile.txt | awk '{print $1}'

answered Apr 21 '15 at 10:50

Maroun

http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/award.html – cdarke Apr 21 '15 at 10:55
Useless link ;) It's serving my needs (specially in logs) since ever. – Maroun Apr 21 '15 at 10:56
Hoisted by my own petard! http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/award.html – cdarke Apr 21 '15 at 10:57

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 21 '15 at 10:52

1

You can try

wc -l file | awk '{print $1}'

answered Apr 21 '15 at 10:52

Tomas Majer

3 Answers3