How can I find out how many lines a text file contains without viewing it?

Question

How can I find how many lines a text file contains without opening the file in an editor or a viewer application? Is there a handy Unix console command to see the number?

Answer 1

Indeed there is. It is called wc, originally for word count, I believe, but it can do lines, words, characters, bytes, and the longest line length. The -l option tells it to count lines.

wc -l mytextfile

Answer 2

Another option would be to use grep to find the number of times a pattern is matched:

grep --regexp="$" --count /path/to/myfile.txt

In this example,

• $ is an expression that evaluates to a new line (enter button is pressed)
• --count suppresses normal output of matches, and displays the number of times it was matched.
• The /path/to/myfile.txt is pretty obvious, I hope :)

EDIT: As mentioned by @hesse in the comments, this can be shortened to

grep -c $ path/to/file