count number of lines in terminal output

Question

couldn't find this on SO. I ran the following command in the terminal:

>> grep -Rl "curl" ./ 

and this displays the list of files where the keyword curl occurs. I want to count the number of files. First way I can think of, is to count the number of lines in the output that came in the terminal. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Pipe the result to wc using the -l (line count) switch:

grep -Rl "curl" ./ | wc -l 

Answer 2

Putting the comment of EaterOfCode here as an answer.

grep itself also has the -c flag which just returns the count

So the command and output could look like this.

$ grep -Rl "curl" ./ -c 24 

EDIT:

Although this answer might be shorter and thus might seem better than the accepted answer (that is using wc). I do not agree with this anymore. I feel like remembering that you can count lines by piping to wc -l is much more useful as you can use it with other programs than grep as well.