On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 08:46 , Shishir K. Singh wrote:
> Is there a way to get the number of lines in a file. Conditions:
>
> a) Without using backticks on wc -l
> b) Without opening the file and looping over the records
not really unless your OS provides some sort of 'meta-data'
file that you could open and it had such in it.
the notion of a 'line' for a 'file' is rather an arbitrary
construct that we have taken to mean
that which ends with the EOL token of this OS
remember that 'wc -l' is really little more than a
fancy way of counting the EOL tokens in a file.
note that the sequence
"\n\n"
would be considered 'two lines' - one of which is 'blank'.
IF you knew that the file were a fixed format structure
such that there were exactly K bytes of data per line,
then you could use stat() or lstat() to return the size
and divide by K to calculate the data.
So if you want an accurate count - then opening the
file and spinning through it would be a way to get that value
my $count=0;
open(FH, $someFile) or die "unable to open $someFile: $!\n";
$count++ while(<FH>);
close FH;
ciao
drieux
---
for fun, understand
[jeeves:/tmp/drieux] drieux% od -c file
0000000 l i n e 1 \n l i n e 2 \n l i n e
0000020 3 \n \n l i n e 4 \n
0000031
[jeeves:/tmp/drieux] drieux% wc -l file
5 file
[jeeves:/tmp/drieux] drieux% grep -c '\n' file
4
[jeeves:/tmp/drieux] drieux%
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