CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbash
Ashley
Ashley

Reputation: 45

Printing the number of lines

I have a directory that contains only .txt files. I want to print the number of lines for every file. When I write cat file.txt | wc -l the number of lines appears but when I want to make a script it's more complicated. I have this code:

for fis in `ls -R  $1`
do
        echo `cat $fis | wc -l`       

done

I tried: wc -l $fis , with awk,grep and it doesn't work. It tells that:

cat: fis1: No such file or directory 0

How can I do to print the number of lines?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 71

Answers (2)

Walter A
Walter A

Reputation: 20002

Not the problem here, but the echo command is more than needed: You can use 

wc -l "${fis}"

What goes wrong? You have a subdir called fis1. Look to the output of ls:

# ls -R fis1
fis1:
file1_in_fis1.txt

When you are parsing this output, your script will try

echo `cat fis1: | wc -l`

The cat will tell you No such file or directory and wc counts 0.

As @Barmar explained, ls prints additional output you do not want.

Do not try to patch your attempt by | grep .txt and if [ -f "${fis}"]; then .., these will fail with filename with spaces.txt. So use find or shopt (and accept the answer of @Barmar or @Cyrus).

Upvotes: 0

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 780974

To find files recursively in subdirectories, use the find command, not ls -R, which is mainly intended for human reading.

find "$1" -type f -exec wc -l {} +

The problems with looping over the output of ls -R are:

  1. Filenames with whitespace won't be parsed correctly.
  2. It prints other output beside just the filenames.

Upvotes: 1

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