Interested in partial command output. - UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

zazzybob · #2 (**permalink**) 12-15-2004

The easiest way is to pipe it through awk

Code:

wc -l file | awk '{print $1}'

You can omit the filename by supplying the file as STDIN, e.g.

Code:

$ wc -l < file

but you'll still get leading whitespace. So the awk solution is easiest.

EDIT: Looking at this, it'd be less expensive to just do the whole thing with awk...

Code:

awk '{c++} END{print c}' file

Cheers
ZB