How to count lines of piped output data with wc If you do wish to modify the file you can manually add line numbers to a text file via command line. This is only counting the lines of a text file as input and it does not modify the file at all. Like:Ĭontrast that command output to the same command with wc -l flag only: You can also run the wc command without the -l flag, which will then reveal the line count, the word count, and the character count, in that order. Using wc to Count Lines, Words, and Character Counts of a File The wc command works the same on any modern Unix based operating system, including Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows with Bash, and more. % wc -l ~/Desktop/exampleFileToCountLines.txtġ213 /Users/Paul/Desktop/exampleFileToCountLines.txtĪs you can see in this example, the line count of the text file given is 1213, meaning the file is 1,213 lines long. Hit Return, you will see the line count of the file printed before the file nameĪs you likely guessed, the -l flag (lower case L) is for “line”.įor example, running the wc -l command on a file located on the desktop called “exampleFileToCountLines.txt ” would look like the following:.At the command prompt enter the following command syntax, replacing “filename” with the file you want to count lines for.

Open a Terminal window if you have not done so already (in Mac OS the Terminal application is found in /Applications/Utilities/).How to Count Lines of Files from the Terminal with wc So if there are no newline characters in a file, and the file is just one enormous sentence or single command string, it would be reported as one line. Wc defines a line as “a string of characters delimited by a newline character”, meaning only unique new lines will be counted as a line. Our focus here is of course on the former, so we’ll be showing how to use wc for counting lines of any text file provided as input. The wc utility is able to display line count, as well as reveal word count and character count. For our purposes here we will use the most direct line counting tool available at the command line, wc.

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