Line Counter

This is a small command-line utility to count lines in text. That's it. That's all it does. Technically, it doesn't even care if it's text.

This is the .NET 6.0 version of my Golang-based line counter. If you're interested in a faster, but also harder to read, .NET version, then check out my version that leverages intrinsics

There are some counting assumptions that I made. I had originally chosen to have this match my editor's line count. That is, if Visual Studio Code shows x lines then my logic would also show x lines. However, I've chosen to follow the behavior of wc -l. I count carriage returns (\n). If a file does not end with a carriage return then the last line will not be counted.

How to Build

Clone this repository and then run dotnet build from the solution root.

> dotnet build -c Release --nologo

This will create a release build of the utility at /nlc/bin/Release/net6.0/nlc.exe. From there, you will need to copy it to a place in your %PATH%.

How to Use

nlc can either have information piped to it or it have a file path passed via the command line.

To read a file:

> nlc "path/to/your/file.txt"

To read from stdin (information piped in):

> echo "Count the lines in this" | nlc

The only output from nlc will be the line count. This is because I want the ability to pipe this on to other programs easily.

So the full run might look like

> nlc "path/to/your/file.txt"
109

Runtime Considerations

There is no timeout when waiting for piped input from stdin. If stdin never ends the stream then nlc will hang until it is force-quit (ctrl+c).

Special Thanks

I'd like to thank Sergio Pedri for his work on the High Performance toolkit. Without it, looking for the number of bytes in a Span is a lot, lot slower.