Question

I’m a newbie to Shell script requirement is need to get row count from a flat(.txt) file and assign to a int variable.

Trying this but not working

FNAME="pn_data_"$month$day$year".txt"
   declare -i recordcount=0
      for f in $FNAME
     do
       recordcount+=`wc $f |'{print $1}'`
     done

Any suggestions around would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The trick with wc is that if you supply a file name on its command line, it prints it in the output. To avoid that, feed it standard input. The RHS of the | symbol is weird — maybe you missed out awk in front of the action? But it is overkill: you can simply write:

declare -i recordcount

recordcount=$(wc -l < $FNAME)

(And I’d not normally bother with the declare line.)

Note that I’m assuming that you have just one file and need the record count from the one file. If you need to process multiple files and get the aggregate count, then you either need to process each file separately in the shell and do arithmetic on the value from wc, or you run wc on all the files and let it print out the total number of lines at the end (which can be post-processed with sed or awk to get just the number from the last line of output).