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question about printing number of lines in a file

 
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# 1  
Old 09-15-2002
question about printing number of lines in a file
as the title, I had try use "wc -l test.txt" but it give me "<many spaces> 384 test.txt" but the result I want is just "384" could any person can help me that?
ThxSmilie
# 2  
Old 09-15-2002
this is one way of doing it:

cat test.txt|wc -l|sed "s/ //g"


Maybe someone has a better solution .. Smilie

/unix_svenne
# 3  
Old 09-16-2002
This should work too:

wc -l test.txt | awk '{print $1}'
# 4  
Old 09-16-2002
use grep instead of cat...
You can also use:

grep -v ^$ file.in |wc -l


^ denotes the beginning of the line $ denotes the end of the line. When put together with grep -v, they elimnate the blank lines!! Smilie


Using cat is an extra step. This is a little more efficient with 2 commands instead of three. Brevity is a programmer's friend.


Smilie
# 5  
Old 09-16-2002
wc will give you the file name if supplied to it. So don't supply it with a file name, use stdin:
wc < test.txt
# 6  
Old 09-17-2002
Wow - the code can always be written shorter and more effieciently..

You'll still have spaces, but if you're using this for a script and are storing the value, then saving it to a variable strips the spaces out automatically...

lines=`wc -l < test.txt`
 
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