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shelltext-filestcsh

Any way to see the number of lines in a file without opening the file?

I have a rather large text file (~45MB) and I want to know how many lines total it has. Since the file is so large, it takes too long to open with a text editor and check manually that way. I am wondering if there is a shell command/shell script (I'd prefer a tcsh answer since that's what I use) or any other way to "quickly" (meaning, more quickly than opening the file and checking out the end) determine how many lines the text file has?

I am in a *nix environment.

Solution 
  • wc -l filename

    It won't be fast, since it has to read the entire file to count the lines. But there's no other way, since Unix doesn't keep track of that anywhere.