count number of lines in terminal output

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

>> grep -Rl "curl" ./

and this displays the list of files where the keyword curl occurs. I want to count the number of files. First way I can think of, is to count the number of lines in the output that came in the terminal. How can I do that?

2

4 Answers

Pipe the result to wc using the -l (line count) switch:

grep -Rl "curl" ./ | wc -l

4

Putting the comment of EaterOfCode here as an answer.

grep itself also has the -c flag which just returns the count

So the command and output could look like this.

$ grep -Rl "curl" ./ -c
24

EDIT:

Although this answer might be shorter and thus might seem better than the accepted answer (that is using wc). I do not agree with this anymore. I feel like remembering that you can count lines by piping to wc -l is much more useful as you can use it with other programs than grep as well.

0

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 <anything> -c

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

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

"abcd4yyyy" | grep 4 -c gives the count as 1

1

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