`countlines(file)` in Base should actually be just as fast as `wc`. But otherwise, you can do
readall(`wc -l ratings.dat`) to capture all the output of a command (note that this is `readstring(`wc -l ratings.dat`)` on 0.5) -Jacob On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 11:43 AM, Douglas Bates <dmba...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have forgotten how to capture the output from a shell command. The > background is that the `wc` program on Linux (and, I assume, OS X) is an > incredibly fast way to count the number of lines in a data file, as in > > julia> run(`wc -l ratings.dat`) > 1000209 ratings.dat > > I want to capture that string and parse the number. >
