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Accepted
Daryl Spitzer
Asked: 2010-07-28 10:41:19 +0800 CST

How do I find the total number of lines in a set of found files (using Linux command-line tools)?

  • 772

I can find the number of lines of each file matching a particular pattern using (for example):

$ find . -name "test.save*" -exec wc -l {} \;
673000 ./test.save8.txt
24000 ./from/test1/test.save3.txt
100 ./from/test1/test.save1.txt
513000 ./from/test1/test.save2.txt
2253000 ./from/test1/test.save4.txt
2252000 ./from/test2/test.save3.txt
100 ./from/test2/test.save1.txt
596000 ./from/test2/test.save2.txt
2224000 ./from/test3/test.save3.txt
100 ./from/test3/test.save1.txt
593000 ./from/test3/test.save2.txt
270000 ./from/test4/test.save3.txt
100 ./from/test4/test.save1.txt
332234 ./from/test4/test.save2.txt
2177000 ./from/test4/test.save4.txt
1728000 ./test.save3.txt
180000 ./test.save1.txt
466000 ./test.save11.txt
233000 ./test.save9.txt
686880 ./test.save5.txt
215262 ./test.save7.txt
2560000 ./test.save12.txt
18080 ./test.save10.txt
432000 ./test.save2.txt
10000 ./test.save4.txt
684000 ./test.save6.txt

How do I add up all the individual numbers (using Linux command-line tools)?

linux command-line-interface find

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This should do it:

    find ... -exec cat {} \; | wc -l

    If your version of find supports it, this will be much faster:

    find ... -exec cat {} + | wc -l

    or if you want both the individual counts and the total:

    find ... | xargs wc -l

    The first two will handle filenames with spaces. In order to make the last one above work if there are filenames with spaces, use -print0 and -0:

    find ... -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l
    • 4

  2. Not very elegant but this would do

    #!/bin/bash
#
total=0
for value in $(find . -name "test.save*" -exec wc -l {} \;|awk '{ print $1 }'); do
let total=total+value
done
echo $total
    • 2

  3. You can take your original solution and pipe into a summing program in awk:

    find . -name "test.save*" -exec wc -l {} \; | \
  awk '{count += $1} END {print count}'
    • 2