Count lines in large files

Question

I commonly work with text files of ~20 Gb size and I find myself counting the number of lines in a given file very often.

The way I do it now it\'s just cat fn

Answer 1

If your computer has python, you can try this from the shell:

python -c "print len(open('test.txt').read().split('\n'))"

This uses python -c to pass in a command, which is basically reading the file, and splitting by the "newline", to get the count of newlines, or the overall length of the file.

@BlueMoon's:

bash-3.2$ sed -n '$=' test.txt
519

Using the above:

bash-3.2$ python -c "print len(open('test.txt').read().split('\n'))"
519