count number of lines in terminal output

Question

couldn\'t find this on SO. I ran the following command in the terminal:

>> grep -Rl \"curl\" ./

and this displays the list of files wher

Answer 1

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 -c

$ echo "asd" | grep "^.*$" -c
1

$ echo -n "asd" | grep "^.*$" -c
1

This is closer to reality than what wc -l will return.