How do I count the number of rows and columns in a file using bash?

Question

Say I have a large file with many rows and many columns. I\'d like to find out how many rows and columns I have using bash.

Answer 1

Simple row count is $(wc -l "$file"). Use $(wc -lL "$file") to show both the number of lines and the number of characters in the longest line.

Answer 2

Perl solution:

perl -ane '$maxc = $#F if $#F > $maxc; END{$maxc++; print "max columns: $maxc\nrows: $.\n"}' file

If your input file is comma-separated:

perl -F, -ane '$maxc = $#F if $#F > $maxc; END{$maxc++; print "max columns: $maxc\nrows: $.\n"}' file

output:

max columns: 5
rows: 2

-a autosplits input line to @F array
$#F is the number of columns -1
-F, field separator of , instead of whitespace
$. is the line number (number of rows)

Answer 3

head -1 file.tsv |head -1 train.tsv |tr '\t' '\n' |wc -l

take the first line, change tabs (or you can use ',' instead of '\t' for commas), count the number of lines.

Answer 4

awk 'BEGIN{FS=","}END{print "COLUMN NO: "NF " ROWS NO: "NR}' file

You can use any delimiter as field separator and can find numbers of ROWS and columns

Answer 5

If counting number of columns in the first is enough, try the following:

awk -F'\t' '{print NF; exit}' myBigFile.tsv

where \t is column delimiter.

Answer 6

For rows you can simply use wc -l file

-l stands for total line

for columns uou can simply use head -1 file | tr ";" "\n" | wc -l

Explanation
head -1 file
Grabbing the first line of your file, which should be the headers, and sending to it to the next cmd through the pipe
| tr ";" "\n"

tr stands for translate.
It will translate all ; characters into a newline character.
In this example ; is your delimiter.

Then it sends data to next command.

wc -l
Counts the total number of lines.