File with the most lines in a directory NOT bytes

Question

I'm trying to to wc -l an entire directory and then display the filename in an echo with the number of lines.

To add to my frustration, the directory has to come from a passed argument. So without looking stupid, can someone first tell me why a simple wc -l $1 doesn't give me the line count for the directory I type in the argument? I know i'm not understanding it completely.

On top of that I need validation too, if the argument given is not a directory or there is more than one argument.

Answer 1

wc works on files rather than directories so, if you want the word count on all files in the directory, you would start with:

wc -l $1/*

With various gyrations to get rid of the total, sort it and extract only the largest, you could end up with something like (split across multiple lines for readability but should be entered on a single line):

pax> wc -l $1/* 2>/dev/null
       | grep -v ' total$'
       | sort -n -k1
       | tail -1l

2892 target_dir/big_honkin_file.txt

As to the validation, you can check the number of parameters passed to your script with something like:

if [[ $# -ne 1 ]] ; then
    echo 'Whoa! Wrong parameteer count'
    exit 1
fi

and you can check if it's a directory with:

if [[ ! -d $1 ]] ; then
    echo 'Whoa!' "[$1]" 'is not a directory'
    exit 1
fi

Answer 2

Is this what you want?

> find ./test1/ -type f|xargs wc -l
       1 ./test1/firstSession_cnaiErrorFile.txt
      77 ./test1/firstSession_cnaiReportFile.txt
   14950 ./test1/exp.txt
       1 ./test1/test1_cnaExitValue.txt
   15029 total

so your directory which is the argument should go here:

find $your_complete_directory_path/ -type f|xargs wc -l

Answer 3

I'm trying to to wc -l an entire directory and then display the filename in an echo with the number of lines.

You can do a find on the directory and use -exec option to trigger wc -l. Something like this:

$ find ~/Temp/perl/temp/ -exec wc -l '{}' \;
wc: /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp/: read: Is a directory
      11 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//accessor1.plx
      25 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//autoincrement.pm
      12 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//bless1.plx
      14 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//bless2.plx
      22 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//classatr1.plx
      27 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//classatr2.plx
       7 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//employee1.pm
      18 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//employee2.pm
      26 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//employee3.pm
      12 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//ftp.plx
      14 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//inherit1.plx
      16 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//inherit2.plx
      24 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//inherit3.plx
      33 /Volumes/Data/jaypalsingh/Temp/perl/temp//persisthash.pm