Count text file unix

The wc utility displays the number of lines, words, and bytes contained in each input file, or standard input if no file is specified to the standard output. You can have any command here instead of cat.

Output from any command can be piped to wc command to count the lines in the output. Our good old friend "grep" can also be used to count the number of lines in a file. These examples are just to let you know that there are multiple ways to count the lines without using "wc -l". I assumed he wanted a faster solution in the eye of pure means surely big data files.

This is usually what I use for counting the number of fields: head -n 1 file. Chris 8, 10 10 gold badges 30 30 silver badges 48 48 bronze badges. Based on Cat Kerr response. Manu Mitra Manu Mitra 9 2 2 bronze badges. And then you're at the accepted answer minus the proper field separator. This would return "1" for the example input. This is essentially the same as accepted answer without field separator, as Bejamin says returns 1 but should work for space delimited files.

Alternative: strong binary checking for max columns on each rows What if some row do contain some extra columns? Hauri F. Hauri The Overflow Blog. Podcast Helping communities build their own LTE networks. Podcast Making Agile work for data science. Awk is a scripting language used for manipulating data and generating reports. The awk command programming language requires no compiling, and allows the user to use variables, numeric functions, string functions, and logical operators.

NR is a AWK built-in variable and it denotes number of records being processed. Usage : NR can be used in action block represents number of line being processed and if it is used in END it can print number of lines totally processed. NF is a predefined variable whose value is the number of fields in the current record. A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters for specifying the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text, mathematical expressions or other data streams.

An example of a delimiter is the comma character, which acts as a field delimiter in a sequence of comma-separated values. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password.

Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Helping communities build their own LTE networks. Podcast Making Agile work for data science.

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