Question

I cannot get this script to work at all. I am just trying to count the number of lines in a file WITHOUT using wc. here is what I have so far

FILE=file.txt
lines=0
while IFS= read -n1 char
do
if [ "$char" == "\n" ]
then
lines=$((lines+1))
fi
done < $FILE

this is just a small part of a bigger script that should count total words, characters and lines in a file. I cannot figure any of it out though. Please help

The problem is the if-statement conditional is never true.. Its as if the program cannot detect what a ‘\n’ is.

Answer 1

declare -i lines=0 words=0 chars=0
while IFS= read -r line; do
    ((lines++))
    array=($line)               # don't quote the var to enable word splitting
    ((words += ${#array[@]}))
    ((chars += ${#line} + 1))   # add 1 for the newline
done < "$filename"
echo "$lines $words $chars $filename"