How to get wc -l to print just the number of lines without file name

Question

wc -l file txt   outputs number of lines and file name   I need just the number itself  not the file name    I can do this   wc -l file txt   awk   print  1     But maybe there is a better way

User · Answer

Best way would be first of all find all files in directory then use AWK NR (Number of Records Variable)

below is the command :

find <directory path>  -type f | awk  'END{print NR}'

example : - find /tmp/ -type f | awk 'END{print NR}'

User · Answer

Comparison of Techniques I had a similar issue attempting to get a character count without the leading whitespace provided by wc  which led me to this page  After trying out the answers here  the following are the results from my personal testing on Mac  BSD Bash   Again  this is for character count  for line count you d do wc -l  echo -n omits the trailing line break  FOO  quot bar quot  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c                             quot        3 quot      x  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   bc                        quot 3 quot             v  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   tr -d                     quot 3 quot             v  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   awk   print  1            quot 3 quot             v  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   cut -d     -f1            quot  quot  for -f  lt  8  x  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   cut -d     -f8            quot 3 quot             v  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   perl -pe  s   s           quot 3 quot             v  echo -n  quot  FOO quot    wc -c   grep -ch                  quot 1 quot             x  echo    printf   s   quot  FOO quot    wc -c                 quot 3 quot             v   I wouldn t rely on the cut -f  method in general since it requires that you know the exact number of leading spaces that any given output may have  And the grep one works for counting lines  but not characters  bc is the most concise  and awk and perl seem a bit overkill  but they should all be relatively fast and portable enough  Also note that some of these can be adapted to trim surrounding whitespace from general strings  as well  along with echo  echo  FOO   another neat trick

User · Answer

How about  grep -ch     file txt

User · Answer

Try this way   wc -l  lt  file txt

User · Answer

This works for me using the normal wc -l and sed to strip any char what is not a number   wc -l big file log   sed -E  s   a-z -         space       g     9249133

User · Answer

Obviously  there are a lot of solutions to this  Here is another one though   wc -l somefile   tr -d    alpha    blank    punct     This only outputs the number of lines  but the trailing newline character   n  is present  if you don t want that either  replace   blank   with   space

User · Answer

How about  wc -l file txt   cut -d    -f1   i e  pipe the output of wc into cut  where delimiters are spaces and pick just the first field

User · Answer

To do this without the leading space  why not   wc -l  lt  file txt   bc

User · Answer

cat file txt   wc -l   According to the man page  for the BSD version  I don t have a GNU version to check        If no files are specified  the standard input is used and no file   name is        displayed   The prompt will accept input until receiving EOF  or   D  in        most environments

[shell] How to get "wc -l" to print just the number of lines without file name?

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