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From: terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to add line numbers to a text file?
Message-ID: <8518@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 30 Nov 90 23:03:48 GMT
References: <6826@uceng.UC.EDU> <15248:Nov3018:01:4490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <rhoward.659993691@romeo>
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Reply-To: terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
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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? I'm
+>> kind of curious to see the variety of approaches possible. Would you
+>> use C, awk, perl, sed, sh, cat, echo, expr, and/or dd?
+
+>grep -n .*
+
+Huh?  This is not even a complete answer....

     BUZZ!!! Thank you for playing, but you're wrong. According to man grep(1)

	-n Each line is preceded by its relative line number in the file.

Although Dan should have quoted the asterisk (tsk, tsk, tsk, Dan!!! (-:)

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

     Maybe yes, maybe no. Most of the time spent in most *grep's is spent
generating the FSA for the pattern matching, not the actual pattern matching
itself.