How to count lines in a document?

wc -l <file.txt>

command | wc -l

Use wc:

wc -l <filename>

This will output the number of lines in <filename>:

$ wc -l /dir/file.txt
3272485 /dir/file.txt

Or, to omit the <filename> from the result use wc -l < <filename>:

$ wc -l < /dir/file.txt
3272485

You can also pipe data to wc as well:

$ cat /dir/file.txt | wc -l
3272485
$ curl yahoo.com --silent | wc -l
63

To count all lines use:

$ wc -l file

To filter and count only lines with pattern use:

$ grep -w "pattern" -c file

Or use -v to invert match:

$ grep -w "pattern" -c -v file

See the grep man page to take a look at the -e,-i and -x args...

there are many ways. using wc is one.

wc -l file

others include

awk 'END{print NR}' file

sed -n '$=' file (GNU sed)

grep -c ".*" file

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