Quickest way to get number of lines in a file

Question

I have a very large file. What would be the fastest way to get the line count. Here are some options I considered:

wc -l file.txt

sed -n '$=' file.txt

For a large file (100GB or larger), what would be the fastest way?

Fastest way is `gawk 'END {print NR}' file_name` – EsmaeelE Dec 11 '22 at 07:57 — EsmaeelE, Dec 11 '22 at 07:57

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 17 '14 at 00:04

2

Here's an interesting discussion about the different options. Benchmarks copied here:

0.024 sec (avg) - wc -l file.txt
0.121 sec (avg) - sed -n '$=' file.txt
0.396 sec (avg) - nl file.txt | tac |sed -n 1p | awk '{print $1}

Run on a 18 Mb - 500,000 line file.

answered Sep 17 '14 at 00:04

nathancahill

The last variant can be written as `nl file.txt | tac | awk '{print $1;exit}'` – jaypal singh Sep 17 '14 at 01:34

1 Answers1