Back to basics with this one, the linux wc command (word count) can be used to count lines, words and bytes in a file and it does it lightning fast. Many times it’s also combined with other commands to get the results you want.
Number of lines in a file
cat file.csv | wc -l
Number of words in a file
This isn’t a very useful command as is, but it will return a count of all words, a word is any contiguous non whitespace character(s) separated by a whitespace character.
wc -w file.txt
Number of characters in a file
wc -m file.txt
