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

Using foreach without inject is about 3% faster than with inject. Both are very much faster (more than 100x in my experience) than using getc.

Using foreach without inject can also be slightly simplified (relative to the snippet given elsewhere in this thread) as follows:

count = 0;  File.foreach(path) { count+=1}
puts "count: #{count}"