
If you want to count the number of lines matching a string pattern in a text file, the “grep” command with the option “-c’ comes in really handy. How to get the number of lines matching a pattern in a file? For example, if we want to count all users who have currently logged on, we can do We can do the same to numerous scenarios. Or ability to piping (or chaining) multiple commands is a hallmark of Linux. Here we fed the output of command “ls -l *.pdf” to “wc”. We just saw an example of using pipe operator “|” to count files.
#MAC TEXT FILE LINE COUNT PDF#
Therefore, the total number of pdf files is one less than the result of “ ls -l *.pdf | wc -l“. For example, to find the number of pdf files in a directoryĪnd remember that the first line of “ls -l” statement is a description. One can also cleverly use the “ wc” command on terminal and find the number of files (or files of certain type) in a directory. How to Count a Certain Type of Files in a Directory? We would get the results in a nice tabular form
#MAC TEXT FILE LINE COUNT WINDOWS#
Why Because Windows uses \r for new line, and Unix uses. As you likely guessed, the -l flag (lower case L) is for line. You may have noticed that a text file that contained the following on a Mac, This is a text file. Hit Return, you will see the line count of the file printed before the file name. For example, to count the number of characters (-m), words (w) and lines (-l) in each of the files file1.txt and file2.txt and the totals for both, we would simply use At the command prompt enter the following command syntax, replacing filename with the file you want to count lines for. To get counts from multiple files, you simply name the files with space between them. Wc command can take multiple files at the same time and give you the number of words, characters, and lines. Count words, characters, and lines in multiple files
