count number of lines in terminal output

Question

couldn t find this on SO  I ran the following command in the terminal     gt  gt  grep -Rl  curl       and this displays the list of files where the keyword curl occurs  I want to count the number of files  First way I can think of  is to count the number of lines in the output that came in the terminal  How can I do that

User · Accepted Answer

Pipe the result to wc using the -l  line count  switch   grep -Rl  curl       wc -l

User · Answer

Piping to  wc  could be better IF the last line ends with a newline  I know that in this case  it will  However  if the last line does not end with a newline  wc -l  gives back a false result    For example     echo  asd    wc -l   Will return 1 and    echo -n  asd    wc -l   Will return 0    So what I often use is grep  lt anything gt  -c    echo  asd    grep        -c 1    echo -n  asd    grep        -c 1   This is closer to reality than what wc -l will return

User · Answer

quot abcd4yyyy quot    grep 4 -c gives the count as 1

User · Answer

Putting the comment of EaterOfCode here as an answer      grep itself also has the -c flag which just returns the count   So the command and output could look like this     grep -Rl  curl     -c 24   EDIT   Although this answer might be shorter and thus might seem better than the accepted answer  that is using wc   I do not agree with this anymore  I feel like remembering that you can count lines by piping to wc -l is much more useful as you can use it with other programs than grep as well

[bash] count number of lines in terminal output

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