Is there a way to get the integer that wc returns in bash?
Basically I want to write the line numbers and word counts to the screen after the file name.
output: filename linecount wordcount
Here is what I have so far:
files=\`ls`
for f in $files;
do
if [ ! -d $f ] #only print out information about files !directories
then
# some way of getting the wc integers into shell variables and then printing them
echo "$f $lines $words"
fi
done
Most simple answer ever:
wc < filename
wc -c < file name, it will give you just the integer number of bytes and nothing else.
wc -l 2>/dev/null < /path/to/filename. You can't redirect the error channel at the end of the pipeline like this usually: wc -l < /path/to/filename 2>/dev/null. This is a crucial difference in how you use this approach, especially if you use this in a script and might not always have a valid filename.Just:
wc -l < file_name
will do the job. But this output includes prefixed whitespace as wc right-aligns the number.
wc -l < foo.txt | xargs ref - stackoverflow.com/a/12973694/149428
lines=`wc -l < $f` results in a variable "line" whose value has no leading spaces.
find . -path -prune -o -name "*.swift" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l works ok but prints every file. If I use find . -path -prune -o -name "*.swift" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l < I get an error. parse error near '\n'
IFS; it's not reliable behavior.You can use the cut command to get just the first word of wc's output (which is the line or word count):
lines=`wc -l $f | cut -f1 -d' '`
words=`wc -w $f | cut -f1 -d' '`
cut to work on the full output of wc $f because the number of spaces between fields varies.
Sometimes wc outputs in different formats in different platforms. For example:
In OS X:
$ echo aa | wc -l
1
In Centos:
$ echo aa | wc -l
1
So using only cut may not retrieve the number. Instead try tr to delete space characters:
$ echo aa | wc -l | tr -d ' '
wc $file | awk {'print "$4" "$2" "$1"'}
Adjust as necessary for your layout.
It's also nicer to use positive logic ("is a file") over negative ("not a directory")
[ -f $file ] && wc $file | awk {'print "$4" "$2" "$1"'}
wc $file | awk '{print $4" "$2" "$1}' -- apostrophes outside of {}.The accepted/popular answers do not work on OSX.
Any of the following should be portable on bsd and linux.
wc -l < "$f" | tr -d ' '
OR
wc -l "$f" | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 2
OR
wc -l "$f" | awk '{print $1}'
If you redirect the filename into wc it omits the filename on output.
Bash:
read lines words characters <<< $(wc < filename)
or
read lines words characters <<EOF
$(wc < filename)
EOF
Instead of using for to iterate over the output of ls, do this:
for f in *
which will work if there are filenames that include spaces.
If you can't use globbing, you should pipe into a while read loop:
find ... | while read -r f
or use process substitution
while read -r f
do
something
done < <(find ...)
read lines words characters filename <<< $(wc "$f") Oh, and if you used * to be hardened against spaces, you also want to double quote the var when you use it.
$f in this case), it's unnecessary. Also, the OP asked for how to get just the integer. You are correct about quoting a variable, but I didn't show the use of the variable, so I omitted mentioning that point. The for f in * form should almost always be used instead of using the output of ls, as you know.ls point. That'll get you an award. partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#ls$_ is just a different variable.If the file is small you can afford calling wc twice, and use something like the following, which avoids piping into an extra process:
lines=$((`wc -l "$f"`))
words=$((`wc -w "$f"`))
The $((...)) is the Arithmetic Expansion of bash. It removes any whitespace from the output of wc in this case.
This solution makes more sense if you need either the linecount or the wordcount.
How about with sed?
wc -l /path/to/file.ext | sed 's/ *\([0-9]* \).*/\1/'
typeset -i a=$(wc -l fileName.dat | xargs echo | cut -d' ' -f1)
Try this for numeric result:
nlines=$( wc -l < $myfile )
Something like this may help:
#!/bin/bash
printf '%-10s %-10s %-10s\n' 'File' 'Lines' 'Words'
for fname in file_name_pattern*; {
[[ -d $fname ]] && continue
lines=0
words=()
while read -r line; do
((lines++))
words+=($line)
done < "$fname"
printf '%-10s %-10s %-10s\n' "$fname" "$lines" "${#words[@]}"
}
To (1) run wc once, and (2) not assign any superfluous variables, use
read lines words <<< $(wc < $f | awk '{ print $1, $2 }')
Full code:
for f in *
do
if [ ! -d $f ]
then
read lines words <<< $(wc < $f | awk '{ print $1, $2 }')
echo "$f $lines $words"
fi
done
Example output:
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec wc {} \; # without formatting
1 2 27 ./CNAME
21 169 1065 ./LICENSE
33 130 961 ./README.md
86 215 2997 ./404.html
71 168 2579 ./index.html
21 21 478 ./sitemap.xml
$ # the above code
404.html 86 215
CNAME 1 2
index.html 71 168
LICENSE 21 169
README.md 33 130
sitemap.xml 21 21
Solutions proposed in the answered question doesn't work for Darwin kernels.
Please, consider following solutions that work for all UNIX systems:
wc -l < file.txt | xargs
wc -m < file.txt | xargs
wc -c < file.txt | xargs
wc -w < file.txt | xargs
wc or a GNU version of wc is completely unrelated to the OS kernel providing the syscalls used by wc to perform I/O operations. If you ran GNU wc on Linux, you'd have the same behavior as GNU wc on Darwin; likewise, if you compiled Apple's wc on Linux, it would behave the same way it does on Darwin.Try this:
wc `ls` | awk '{ LINE += $1; WC += $2 } END { print "lines: " LINE " words: " WC }'
It creates a line count, and word count (LINE and WC), and increase them with the values extracted from wc (using $1 for the first column's value and $2 for the second) and finally prints the results.
"Basically I want to write the line numbers and word counts to the screen after the file name."
answer=(`wc $f`)
echo -e"${answer[3]}
lines: ${answer[0]}
words: ${answer[1]}
bytes: ${answer[2]}"
Outputs : myfile.txt lines: 10 words: 20 bytes: 120
-e argument to echo without a very good reason -- POSIX outright disallows it, and consequently, major shells can be configured to turn it off (or don't treat it as anything other than an instruction to print the string -e by default).-e here at all -- your newlines are literal to start with, so you don't need any transformation from the two-character \n sequence to the single-character newline in the first place. And beyond that, not having any space between the -e and the opening quotes make behavior very much undefined.${answer[3]} will have only the first part of it; or if the first part of the filename can be expanded as a glob, you can get a list of other filenames in your current directory in its place -- consider the file created with touch '* READ ME FIRST *').files=`ls`
echo "$files" | wc -l | perl -pe "s#^\s+##"
perl anyway, might as well do the word count in Perl too. A more economical approach would be to pipe to tr -d '[:space:]'You have to use input redirection for wc:
number_of_lines=$(wc -l <myfile.txt)
respectively in your context
echo "$f $(wc -l <"$f") $(wc -w <"$f")"
lsfor f in *; doand skip$filesentirely. If you want to store a list of filenames, the correct data structure is an array:files=( * ); for f in "${files[@]}"; do if [ ! -d "$f" ]; then ...-- note the quotes, they're important; if you run your code through shellcheck.net and follow the links in the warnings it throws, they go to wiki pages explaining why.