#31 Displaying a File with Line Numbers
There are a lot of ways to add line numbers to a displayed file, many of which are quite short. Here's a solution using awk:
awk '{ print NR": "$0 }' < inputfile
On some Unix implementations, the cat command has an -n flag, and on others, the more (or less, or pg) pager has a flag for specifying that each line of output should be numbered. But on some Unixes, none of these will work, in which case the simple script given here can do the job.
The Code
#!/bin/sh # numberlines - A simple alternative to cat -n, etc. for filename do linecount="1" while read line do echo "${linecount}: $line" linecount="$(( $linecount + 1 ))" done < $filename done exit 0
Running the Script
You can feed as many filenames ...
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