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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to add line numbers to a text file?
Message-ID: <18438:Nov3021:25:2590@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 30 Nov 90 21:25:25 GMT
References: <6826@uceng.UC.EDU> <15248:Nov3018:01:4490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <rhoward.659993691@romeo>
Organization: IR
Lines: 22

In article <rhoward.659993691@romeo> rhoward@msd.gatech.edu (Robert L. Howard) writes:
> In <15248:Nov3018:01:4490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> >In article <6826@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) writes:
> >> My question to all of you, however, is this: faced with the need to
> >> number a text file from a shell script, how would you do it?
> >grep -n .*
> Huh?  This is not even a complete answer....

Of course it is. Whatever your shell is, you want to exec grep with
arguments -n and .*. Of course, in most shells you'll have to quote the
asterisk. By assumption, the input is a text file. Why is more
information necessary?

> cat -n <infile >outfile
> (It's got to be faster than grep too)

Possibly, but I find its output format more difficult to use directly as
input to other programs.

(Yeah, that's it: echo 'set nu' >> ~/.exinit. :-) )

---Dan