I use huge data files, sometimes I only need to know the number of lines in these files, usually I open them up and read them line by line until I reach the end of the file<
The accepted answer has an off by one error for multi line files which don't end in newline. A one line file ending without a newline would return 1, but a two line file ending without a newline would return 1 too. Here's an implementation of the accepted solution which fixes this. The endsWithoutNewLine checks are wasteful for everything but the final read, but should be trivial time wise compared to the overall function.
public int count(String filename) throws IOException {
InputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(filename));
try {
byte[] c = new byte[1024];
int count = 0;
int readChars = 0;
boolean endsWithoutNewLine = false;
while ((readChars = is.read(c)) != -1) {
for (int i = 0; i < readChars; ++i) {
if (c[i] == '\n')
++count;
}
endsWithoutNewLine = (c[readChars - 1] != '\n');
}
if(endsWithoutNewLine) {
++count;
}
return count;
} finally {
is.close();
}
}