UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Command output is given to the console. As in the following case -

wc -l filename
produces following output
nn filename

From this, I am only interested with nn(rowcount). Cant we simply extract it thr console?

I also tried with null device, I know as - /dev/null

wc -l filename > /dev/null | cut -d " " -f 1 /dev/null

This also didnt help me.

Will I have to use temporary file, in order to retrieve only rowcount?

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