CODEWITHSUNDEEP
command-linepowershellcsvcountpowershell-1.0
jrara
jrara

Reputation: 16981

PowerShell: how to count number of rows in csv file?

How can I count the number of rows in a csv file using powershell? I tried something like

Get-Content -length "C:\Directory\file.csv"

or

(Get-Content).length "C:\Directory\file.csv"

but these result an error.

Upvotes: 36

Views: 140548

Answers (6)

Sandeep Bharani
Sandeep Bharani

Reputation: 39

You can simply use unix like comand in powershell.

If you file test.csv Then command to get rowcount is

gc test.csv | Measure-Object

Upvotes: 3

Ten98
Ten98

Reputation: 832

Get-Content and Measure-Object are fine for small files, but both are super inefficient with memory. I had real problems with large files.

When counting rows in a 1GB file using either method, Powershell gobbled up all available memory on the server (8GB), then started paging to disk. I left it over an hour, but it was still paging to disk so I killed it.

The best method I found for large files is to use IO.StreamReader to load the file from disk and count each row using a variable. This keeps memory usage down to a very reasonable 25MB and is much, much quicker, taking around 30 seconds to count rows in a 1GB file or a couple of minutes for a 6GB file. It never eats up unreasonable amounts of RAM, no matter how large your file is:

[int]$LinesInFile = 0
$reader = New-Object IO.StreamReader 'c:\filename.csv'
 while($reader.ReadLine() -ne $null){ $LinesInFile++ }

The above snippet can be inserted wherever you would use get-content or measure-object, simply refer to the $LinesInFile variable to get the row count of the file.

Upvotes: 65

Shay Levy
Shay Levy

Reputation: 126702

Pipe it to the Measure-Object cmdlet

Import-Csv C:\Directory\file.csv | Measure-Object

Upvotes: 45

devonuto
devonuto

Reputation: 423

(Import-Csv C:\Directory\file.csv).count is the only accurate one out of these.

I tried all of the other suggestions on a csv with 4781 rows, and all but this one returned 4803.

Upvotes: -1

julien
julien

Reputation: 11

You can try 

(Import-Csv C:\Directory\file.csv).count

or 

$a=Import-Csv C:\Directory\file.csv
$a.count

Upvotes: 0

stej
stej

Reputation: 29449

Generally (csv or not)

@(Get-Content c:\file.csv).Length

If the file has only one line, then, it will fail. (You need the @ prefix...otherwise if the file has one line, it will only count the number of characters in that line.

Get-Content c:\file.csv | Measure-Object -line

But both will fail if any record takes more than one row. Then better import csv and measure:

Import-Csv c:\file.csv | Measure-Object | Select-Object -expand count

Upvotes: 12

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