Bash: output line count from wc in human readable format

Question

Is that possible? Doing wc the straight forward way I have to spend some mental energy to see that the file contains more than 40 million lines:

$ wc -l 20150210.txt 
    45614736 20150210.txt

I searched around and numfmt showed up, but that is evidently not available on OSX (nor on brew). So is there a simple way to do this on OSX? Thanks.

Does `printf "%'d\n" 45614736` do what you want on OS X? (I don't know how portable that format string is.) — Etan Reisner, May 12 '15 at 14:28
Note `gnumfmt` should be available throgh `brew install coreutils` — pixelbeat, Sep 05 '15 at 00:58

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered May 12 '15 at 14:28

9

If you have POSIX printf you can use the %'d:

printf "%'d\n" $(wc -l < file )

From man printf:

'

For decimal conversion (i, d, u, f, F, g, G) the output is to be grouped with thousands' grouping characters if the locale information indicates any. Note that many versions of gcc(1) cannot parse this option and will issue a warning. SUSv2 does not include %'F

Test

$ seq 100000 > a
$ printf "%'d\n" $(wc -l <a )
100,000

Note also the trick wc -l < file to get the number without the file name.

answered May 12 '15 at 14:28

fedorqui

275,237
103
548
598

Thank you, but when I do `$printf "%'d\n" 45614736` i get the output `45614736` with no formatting. Strange? – luffe May 12 '15 at 14:31
2

The output from `%'d` is locale-dependent. What is the output of `locale | grep LC_NUMERIC`? – chepner May 12 '15 at 14:37
Ah, it says `LC_NUMERIC="C"` – luffe May 12 '15 at 14:38
3

I did `LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"`. Now it works. Thanks – luffe May 12 '15 at 14:43

Bash: output line count from wc in human readable format

1 Answers1

Test