CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
Ayrx
Ayrx

Reputation: 2162

How to print out the number of lines in an output command

For example:

cat /etc/passwd

What is the easiest way to count and display the number of lines the command outputs?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4577

Answers (1)

Hari Menon
Hari Menon

Reputation: 35395

wc is the unix utility which counts characters, words, lines etc. Try man wc to learn more about it. The -l option makes it print only the number of lines (and not characters and other stuff).

So, wc -l <filename> will print the number of lines in the file <filename>.

You asked about how to count number of lines output from a command line program in general. To do that, you can use pipes in unix. So, you can pipe the output of any command to wc -l. In your example, cat /etc/password is the command line program you want to count. For that you should do:

cat /etc/password | wc -l

Upvotes: 7

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