Variable for number of lines in a file

Question

I'm trying to put the number of lines in a file into an integer variable.

This is how i'm doing it

typeset -i x
x=`wc -l $1`

where $1 is the command line arg

The problem is that wc -l gives a number and the filename like: 5 blah

Is there a way to only put the number into x?

Answer 1

x=$(wc -l < "$1")

This avoids a useless use of cat and any forks, and would work on a path containing spaces and even newlines.

Answer 2

You could do cat $1 | wc -l instead.

Or wc -l $1 | cut -d " " -f 1.

Answer 3

wc -l $1 | awk '{print $1}'

with awk