How to count lines in a document?

Alucard picture Alucard · Jun 29, 2010 · Viewed 1.5M times · Source

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?

Answer

user85509 picture user85509 · Jun 29, 2010

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