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Questions tagged [wc]

`wc` utility counts newline, word, and byte for file(s) or standard input.

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Why does "cat | wc -c" shows different size than "ls -l" for a specific file?

The distro is Ubuntu 22.04 and I'm running a newly-created ext4 filesystem that I have copied my setup to (using rsync on a different machine). I was running a manually written (python) filesystem ...
melonfsck - she her's user avatar
0 votes
3 answers
84 views

Pass output of command line to awk variable

I am trying to normalise a data file using the number of lines in a previous version of the data file. After reading these questions, I thought this could work: awk -v num=$(wc -l my_first_file.bed) '{...
Whitehot's user avatar
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2 answers
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wc to get character count of a file but exclude the initial characters of each line and the first line of the file?

I have some text files the looks something like this: Introduction and some meta data [00:00.000 --> 00:04.380] Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. [00:04.980 --> 00:07.200]...
d-b's user avatar
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Why is wc with multiple paths much faster than one by one execution?

Running wc with multiple files is an order of magnitude faster than running it file by file. For example: > time git ls-files -z | xargs -0 wc -l > ../bach.x real 0m2.765s user 0m0.031s ...
tmaj's user avatar
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0 answers
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When using 'wc \-l' to count the number of file lines, the result is less one [duplicate]

I want to count the number of file lines, so i use the command wc -l file. However, I notice that the result is incorrect which one less than the real number of lines. For example, the number of lines ...
Bioinfotec's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
146 views

Counting Files in Remote location using sftp in shell script

Getting Error with the below command to check on the Remote directory a specific type of files. The requirement is to get the count of the specific files. file_exists=$(sftp $FTP_UNAME@$FTP_HOST ls *$...
MALABIKA GARAI's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
50 views

How to extract the number of lines from the wc command output

When running wc -l models.txt, we get the output which looks like 2113 models_work.txt. I wonder how to get the 2113 from that output using the cut command or something along those lines. It doesn't ...
Tung's user avatar
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1 answer
53 views

Moves files with the same name to a directory and writes the counted number to the directory name

find /volume1/file/* -type f \( -name "*DF*" -a -name "*LIVE*" \) -print0 | while IFS= read -d '' file do # extract the name of the directory to create dirName="${file%...
anisphia's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
930 views

Why does wc and stat produce different results for /proc/[pid]/cmdline?

I am trying to understand why wc and stat report different things for /proc/[pid]/cmdline. wc says my shell's cmdline file is 6 bytes in size: $ wc --bytes /proc/$$/cmdline 6 /proc/10425/cmdline stat ...
Shane Bishop's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
122 views

How do I count all the files at different subfolder using for loop

I want to know could I wc -l files are in subfolder.If only one file I can use code like below. find ./calss{1..20}/ -name 'C1.student' | xargs wc -l In fact, I have 20 folders , every folder contain ...
Roq's user avatar
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1 answer
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wc -l filename is showing one row less. Please guide

with command wc -l filename it is showing one row less when total number of rows inside file are 2 but it is showing 1 only. Please guide.
user555948's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
1k views

How can I run wc on each result of the find command?

I want to see how many lines exist in each file that has been found using the find command. I know I can use wc -l to find the lines number of a single file. But this does not work when piped from the ...
Saeed Neamati's user avatar
18 votes
3 answers
4k views

How to live update `wc -l`?

I have a command <streaming ls> | wc -l, it works fine, but the <streaming ls> takes a while, which means I don't get the final line count until a few minutes later. Is there a way to have ...
Foobar's user avatar
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1 vote
2 answers
1k views

How to count the number of lines per file in a directory, then create summary of number of files with n lines

I'm trying to create a summary of how many files in a directory have n number of lines in them. I'm using wc -l * | sort to print out the number of lines against the name of each file. What I'm trying ...
Doodling's user avatar
-1 votes
1 answer
2k views

Find how many words in a file contain a number in them?

I am trying to find the total number of words in a specific file that contain a number. Not a specific number, I'm just looking for words that contain any number at all. I tried using the grep and ...
Doug's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
957 views

Linux - count words with more than a certain length of characters

i want to know how to count the number of words in a .txt file that has more than 5 characters, using egrep and wc. Please, be clear as i'm new to linux.
LearningLinux's user avatar
0 votes
3 answers
452 views

Find number of lines between a pattern inside specific filetype

I have a notes.json file inside each directory. The following command counts length of each notes.json file and returns a sorted output by each file's number of lines. find . -name notes.json | xargs ...
SKPS's user avatar
  • 13
0 votes
3 answers
121 views

Sort files by LoC - sort not working when piped from wc -l

I'm trying to sort a directory of files by LoC. But sort appears to do nothing if the lines are piped in: paths=`find ./src/ | egrep "\.(cpp|h)$"` for path in $paths; do wc -l $path | sort -...
Jonathan Levin's user avatar
-1 votes
1 answer
108 views

How to automatically count number of lines printed by each command?

How to automatically count number of lines printed by each command? Examples: $ echo xxx xxx 1 $ ls -1 xxx yyy zzz 3 $ > t0.txt 0 etc. I.e. how to correctly add | wc -l into .bashrc?
pmor's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
116 views

How to display a continuous wc on stdout? [duplicate]

Lets say you have this program: #!/usr/bin/env python import time while True: print("True") time.sleep(1) then you run it: ./clock.py | wc -l This will never return anything ...
BigBoy1337's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
1k views

Count number of rows of files matching pattern [closed]

I would like to list the files matching a specific pattern along with their number of rows. So far I have tried the following, which list me the files matching the desired pattern: find 2021.12.*/ -...
JejeBelfort's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
5k views

wc command with no FILE argument (reading from standard input)

Regarding wc (word count) command... I am trying to understand the following (from man wc which I have quoted below plus added a longer quote at end of my question) With no FILE, or when FILE is -, ...
PurpleMongrel's user avatar
-6 votes
2 answers
220 views

How do you print out repeated lines according to my problems below? [closed]

Below are the questions that I'm having trouble with, I only know how to redirect the stdout of ls to the foobar file on question 1: ls > foobar Write a command line to redirect stdout of the ...
Kudoss's user avatar
  • 1
0 votes
2 answers
109 views

Redirect and rows count in filename

I try to name a file with rows count in a crontab : * * * * * ~/script > "~/targetfile-$(rows-count).csv" I can do : * * * * * ~/script > "~/targetfile-$(~/script | wc -l).csv&...
JCH77's user avatar
  • 111
2 votes
3 answers
3k views

Print number of files excluding directories [duplicate]

I learned that 'ls | wc -l' command prints number of files in the current directory, but it includes all files and directories. Can I do the same task only for pure files excluding directories?
user67275's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
2k views

Difference between wc -c and ${#}?

I've created script, where I encoded string 28 times with base64. Then I wanted to echo count of chars in outputted string. First I used ${#var} which gave me 34070. Then I tried on the same string ...
unnamedrider1337's user avatar
-1 votes
1 answer
730 views

Print filename, number of line with file size and modification date

I want to print the File Name, Size of file, modification date, Number of line in a file. At present I use below command to achieve my work but it's hectic to do manually everytime ls -lrth file1.csv ...
Satya's user avatar
  • 13
1 vote
2 answers
775 views

$(grep -w "xyz" prog.R | wc -l) -ge 3

I am a bit new to unix and trying to figure out what the following command is doing: $(grep -w "xyz" prog.R | wc -l) -ge 3 I assume that the outcome would be boolean. The first part (i.e., ...
Bishal's user avatar
  • 11
1 vote
0 answers
70 views

Append rowcount for all files in a directory to filename before extension

I am trying to write a one-liner to append a row count to the filename of each file in a directory before the extension. I thought I could do this with wc -1 but I am struggling to get it in a ...
kadagreatish's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
387 views

How do you replace sed and wc with awk? (counting names in directories)

I'd like to count the number of elements inside a folder. I thought of function lsc { /bin/ls -l $1 | sed 1d | wc -l } but then I remembered how awk people reduced those kind of pipes, getting rid of ...
ychaouche's user avatar
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5 votes
5 answers
2k views

How to exclude the . and .. using ls or find?

I have 35 files and directory in my home at the first level (without descending into subdirectories). But the results are "faked" and report 36 because they include the . special directory. ...
elbarna's user avatar
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-3 votes
1 answer
89 views

Basic command problems

I tried to figure out what is the difference those commands (for a school project), but for me its chrashed or running for more than 10min~ So, the sample: sudo find / -type f -exec file ’{}’ ; | ...
user439978's user avatar
0 votes
3 answers
2k views

"wc -l" takes very long for my files, is there a faster alternative?

I need help in writing script that outputs the number of lines in each of a number of large files. wc -l is taking a long time, so I'm looking to use awk command to display the last line number for ...
Rekha Mallam's user avatar
2 votes
3 answers
1k views

Count characters in line after first grep result, but removing new line from count

The problem: I have multiple text files (.fas), which look like this: file1.fas: >species1 AICGICVIAGIAIYIAAICG >species2 AICGIVVYICAGAYICAGCG file2.fas: >species1 AIG >species2 GCI I'm ...
Biomage's user avatar
  • 145
0 votes
2 answers
116 views

Count the number of directories in a list of directories

I have a large number of directories, and I want to count with bash commands the number of directories in each of these directories. I am having a hard time piping ls and wc to achieve what I want. E....
GZ-'s user avatar
  • 337
0 votes
1 answer
442 views

Piping and writing additional output to the output file

I want to write the output of wc -l to a file and before the number, I want to add the date. For example, $ wc -l file.txt 25 $ I want to append Wed Jul 8 17:30:17 +0130 2020 25 to another text ...
mahmood's user avatar
  • 1,251
0 votes
1 answer
456 views

Replace with lines number in specific line of a text file

What I need to do (in Bash) is a replacement of a specific characted of the second line in a text file with the number of lines in this file. So, this does the job of counting the lines: cat test.csv ...
WojtusJ's user avatar
  • 103
2 votes
2 answers
350 views

Loop through folders and count files in TARs

I need to go through folders and count files in TARs with same name. I tried this: find -name example.tar -exec tar -tf {} + | wc -l But it fails: tar: ./rajce/rajce/example.tar: Not found in ...
Rajce's user avatar
  • 23
0 votes
1 answer
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use wc -l after succesfuly executing other commands first

from a file (/etc/services) i need to take out all services, exluding all double or more entries per service, exluding lines starting with '#', sort alfabetically and store to a file. After all this ...
Dave Bulcke's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
2k views

word count redirect

I can't seem to answer this question: Use the command wc to count the number of words in the file /course/linuxgym/gutenberg/0ws0310.txt. Store the exact output of the wc command when used with the ...
william's user avatar
6 votes
9 answers
1k views

Position, by word count, of all repetitions of a word in a text file

I want to find where a word appears in a text file — as in the number of words into the text that a word occurs — for all instances of that word, but I'm not sure even where to start. I imagine I'll ...
Johnny Rollerfeet's user avatar
4 votes
4 answers
2k views

`wc -l` alternative that displays the count, as it receives the lines

I'm using wc -l to count the lines in output of a command, as the input is piped to it. commad | wc -l This works fine, but if command is doing some heavy computation, this is quite slow. Is there ...
Peeyush Kushwaha's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
57 views

Perform series of commands on every value in a field

I have a tsv file. For a specific value in a column 5, I want to extract all the rows, and then cut three columns and then count the unique lines. For example for string 'abc' in column 5, I want awk ...
Arsala's user avatar
  • 67
2 votes
2 answers
708 views

How to find and count matching data for an ID column in two files?

I've got two genetic datasets which have matching chromosome position IDs. I want to count how many times file 1's chromosome position IDs appear in file 2. For example my data looks like: File 1 (...
DN1's user avatar
  • 237
1 vote
2 answers
651 views

diffrence between ls -l *.<sometthing> | wc -l and ls -l | grep <something> | wc -l

I have a folder with a huge file list that I want to count. I was doing ls -l *.json | wc -l and it was working fine, till the list apparently gone huge enough that this command didn't work any more. ...
elmodeer's user avatar
14 votes
4 answers
39k views

How to skip the first line of my output? [duplicate]

Here is the issue, I would like to count the number of jobs I have in the hpc, but it is not one of the readily provided features. So I made this simple script squeue -u user_name | wc -l where ...
zyy's user avatar
  • 301
0 votes
0 answers
749 views

Command "wc -l" displays wrong count of lines, possibly because each line starts with a comma?

I have a czv.gz file and when issuing "less" command it looks like this COLUMN1,COLUMN2,COLUMN3 ,value1,value2,value3 ,value4,value5,value6 ... There are thousands of lines in a file but when I ...
kamokoba's user avatar
  • 163
0 votes
4 answers
348 views

Get file names of n files with highest line count

I am trying to get x amount of file names printed from highest line count to lowest. ATM i have this wc -l /etc/*.conf |sort -rn | head -6 | tail -5 | and i get this 543 /etc/ltrace.conf 523 /...
RytisAndrulionis's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
2k views

Error in wc command to read number of lines in file

I have been using wc -l to check for the number of lines exist in my files. It worked fine always but not this time. I have 120 big files that are supposed to have at least two lines in each of them....
web's user avatar
  • 193
1 vote
2 answers
345 views

Wrong result when recursively count lines with wc

I am using the following Linux command to recursively count lines of text files in a folders structure: find . -name '*.txt' | xargs -d '\n' wc -l This outputs all found files and their number of ...
Nikola Obreshkov's user avatar