Count the number of lines in a file without reading entire file into memory?

Question

I\'m processing huge data files (millions of lines each).

Before I start processing I\'d like to get a count of the number of lines in the file, so I can then indic

Answer 1

Summary of the posted solutions

require 'benchmark'
require 'csv'

filename = "name.csv"

Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report { `wc -l < #{filename}`.to_i }
  x.report { File.open(filename).inject(0) { |c, line| c + 1 } }
  x.report { File.foreach(filename).inject(0) {|c, line| c+1} }
  x.report { File.read(filename).scan(/\n/).count }
  x.report { CSV.open(filename, "r").readlines.count }
end

File with 807802 lines:

       user     system      total        real
   0.000000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.030606)
   0.370000   0.050000   0.420000 (  0.412472)
   0.360000   0.010000   0.370000 (  0.374642)
   0.290000   0.020000   0.310000 (  0.315488)
   3.190000   0.060000   3.250000 (  3.245171)