Scripting – Taking a filename as an argument and counts the number of lines in that file

Certainly! Here’s a simple shell script that takes a filename as an argument and counts the number of lines in that file using the wc (word count) command:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if a filename is provided as an argument
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <filename>"
    exit 1
fi

filename="$1"

# Check if the file exists
if [ ! -f "$filename" ]; then
    echo "File not found: $filename"
    exit 1
fi

# Count the number of lines using wc
line_count=$(wc -l < "$filename")

echo "Number of lines in $filename: $line_count"

Save this script to a file (e.g., count_lines.sh), make it executable using chmod +x count_lines.sh, and then run it with the filename as an argument:

./count_lines.sh yourfile.txt

Replace yourfile.txt with the actual filename you want to count the lines for. The script will provide you with the number of lines in the specified file.