in reply to Shell scripts?

These are two very different things!
The Shell Scripting is a great language, I love it.
See this site for your learning..
From Learning Perl:
So, the best you can do is stare at a shell script, figure out what it does, and start from scratch with Perl. Of course, you can do a quick-and-dirty transliteration, by putting major portions of the original script inside system() calls or backquotes. You might be able to replace some of the operations with native Perl: for example, replace system(rm fred) with unlink(fred), or a shell for loop with a Perl for loop. But generally you'll find it's a bit like converting a COBOL program into C (with about the same reduction in the number of characters and increase in illegibility).

Second answer:
cat filename | wc -l

[download]
on the Unix shell
UPDATE:
or better:
wc -l filename

[download]
thanks pelagic

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Shell scripts?
by pelagic (Priest) on Apr 30, 2004 at 08:27 UTC
    wc -l filenamewill do.

    pelagic
[reply]
[d/l]

      And if yu really want to do it in Perl that you can always use the Shell module that is standard with Perl: 

      use Shell;
                                                                      
+          
my $foo = wc('-l', '.bash_profile');
                                                                      
+          
print $foo;

      [download]
      ;-}

      /J\

[reply]
[d/l]
      Careful, tiger. wc's behavior differs depending on whether it read from stdin or you passed it a file. Observe: 
      thulben@bravo:~
7$ wc -l file
10 file
thulben@bravo:~
8$ cat file | wc -l
10
thulben@bravo:~
9$
      So, to get just the line count, you'd either have to do the cat-pipe thing, or pipe the results to awk.

      thor

[reply]

        Or to reduce unnecessary forking you can just redirect STDIN: 

           wc -l <file

        [download]

        /J\

[reply]
[d/l]
        >   wc's behavior differs ?
        $cat file | wc -l
      10
$wc -l file
      10 file
$wc -l < file
      10
$

        [download]
        The output might be formatted differently but the counting remains the same.

        pelagic
[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom