UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I would like to use basename with wc .. I know I can use awk, but want to use basename.

Change this

Code:

wc -l txt*
106 /home/popeye/txt1
154 /home/popeye/txt2
159 /home/popeye/txt3
420 total

to this

Code:

wc -l txt*
106 txt1
154 txt2
159 txt3
420 total

basename does not work that way. Use awk.

Hello popeye,

When I try wc -l in my bash server it didn't give me complete path of files as you shown in your example. Could you please try following and let me know if this helps you.

Code:

 for i in txt*
 do
     wc -l $i
 done

It should not give you the complete path but if you need to look for files which are present into a more than one level of directories then you can use find command then, let us know if this helps you.


Thanks,
R. Singh

What OS and version are you using. I've tried several and can't replicate your problem of it specifying full paths.

My output is always the count followed by the files as matched by my criteria, i.e. if I try to list *.txt it will show just the file names. if I list /tmp/* then I get the path included.


Robin

I think the easy solution is to use cd first.
Use a subshell and you don't even need to remember where you were:

Code:

( cd /dir && wc -l txt* )

edit:

if you're just curious about the functionality of basename, it operates on a parameter and doesn't strip paths from stdin. so piping to it is not going to work. you'd have to read and split wc's output using the shell and feed it back into basename, like so:

Code:

wc -l ./temp/* | while read lines file; do
  echo "$lines $(basename "$file")"
done

but at this point you may as well continue using the shells feature of parameter expansion to save from calling external programs a whole lot:

Code:

  echo "$lines ${file##*/}"