wc gzipped files?

Question

I have a directory with both uncompressed and gzipped files and want to run wc -l on this directory. wc will provide a line count value for the compressed files which is not accurate (since it seems to count newlines in the gzipped version of the file). Is there a way to create a zwc script similar to zgrep that will detected the gzipped files and count the uncompressed lines?

Answer 1

Try this zwc script:

#! /bin/bash --
for F in "$@"; do
  echo "$(zcat -f <"$F" | wc -l) $F"
done

Answer 2

You can use zgrep to count lines as well (or rather the beginning of lines)

zgrep -c ^ file.txt