Question

I’m trying to figure out how many lines exist in a CSV I’m about to iterate over so I can monitor progress.

From the command line, this gives the correct value:

cat /path/to/CA_MA.csv | perl -p -i -e "s/^M/\n/g" | wc -l

However, using shell_exec(), I get nothing back:

trim( shell_exec( "cat /path/to/CA_MA.csv | perl -p -i -e 's/^M/\n/g' | wc -l" ) )

I’ve tried both STDOUT and STDERR (... 2>&1). and I’ve tried this from my script from the interactive console (php -a).

Answer 1

Count lines in a file using PHP

<?php 
  $file = "somefile.txt"; 

  $lines = count(file($file)); 

  echo "There are $lines lines in $file"; 
?>

It even works on files with “DOS” line endings.