Saturday, April 2, 2022

[SOLVED] Suppressing summary information in `wc -l` output

Issue

I use the command wc -l count number of lines in my text files (also i want to sort everything through a pipe), like this:

wc -l $directory-path/*.txt | sort -rn

The output includes "total" line, which is the sum of lines of all files:

10 total
5 ./directory/1.txt
3 ./directory/2.txt
2 ./directory/3.txt

Is there any way to suppress this summary line? Or even better, to change the way the summary line is worded? For example, instead of "10", the word "lines" and instead of "total" the word "file".


Solution

Yet a sed solution!

1. short and quick

As total are comming on last line, $d is the command for deleting last line.

wc -l $directory-path/*.txt | sed '$d'

2. with header line addition:

wc -l $directory-path/*.txt | sed '$d;1ilines total'

Unfortunely, there is no alignment.

3. With alignment: formatting left column at 11 char width.

wc -l $directory-path/*.txt |
    sed -e '
        s/^ *\([0-9]\+\)/          \1/;
        s/^ *\([0-9 ]\{11\}\) /\1 /;
        /^ *[0-9]\+ total$/d;
        1i\      lines filename'

Will do the job

      lines file
          5 ./directory/1.txt
          3 ./directory/2.txt
          2 ./directory/3.txt

4. But if really your wc version could put total on 1st line:

This one is for fun, because I don't belive there is a wc version that put total on 1st line, but...

This version drop total line everywhere and add header line at top of output.

wc -l $directory-path/*.txt |
    sed -e '
        s/^ *\([0-9]\+\)/          \1/;
        s/^ *\([0-9 ]\{11\}\) /\1 /;
        1{
            /^ *[0-9]\+ total$/ba;
            bb;
           :a;
            s/^.*$/      lines file/
        };
        bc;
       :b;
        1i\      lines file' -e '
       :c;
        /^ *[0-9]\+ total$/d
    '

This is more complicated because we won't drop 1st line, even if it's total line.



Answered By - F. Hauri
Answer Checked By - Marie Seifert (WPSolving Admin)
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