Is there a way in Matlab to determine the number of lines in a file without looping through each line?

Question

Obviously one could loop through a file using fgetl or similar function and increment a counter, but is there a way to determine the number of lines in a file without

Answer 1

I would recommend using an external tool for this. For example an app called cloc, which you can download here for free.

On linux you then simply type cloc and get

YourPC$ cloc 
      87 text files.
      81 unique files.                              
      23 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=0.19 s (311.7 files/s, 51946.9 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MATLAB                          59           1009           1074           4993
HTML                             1              0              0             23
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            60           1009           1074           5016
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They also claim it should work on windows.