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Display a File with Line Number

Terminal - Display a File with Line Number
nl filename | more
2009-05-04 07:35:16
User: haivu
Functions: nl
-2
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Display a File with Line Number

The nl command lists the contents of a file where is each line is prefixed by a line number. For more information about this command, check out its man page. I tested under Mac OS X and Xubuntu 9.04

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Know a better way?

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What others think

You can also use "cat -n filename"

Comment by felix001 69 weeks and 3 days ago

Much easier just to use "less -N". -N can also be turned off and on while in an existing less session.

Comment by sevrinsky 69 weeks and 3 days ago

The best feature to nl in my opinion is that you can give it a regex to only number certain lines with the -p option.

I often use nl when I want to number some lines of text that I am editing in vim. Here's how to use nl to do that: select the lines of text you want to number, and in command ':' mode enter '! nl' and the vim command line will look like this:

:'<,'>! nl

the exclamation point tells vim to filter the selection through the following shell command, which is 'nl' in this case.

Comment by bwoodacre 69 weeks and 2 days ago

Your point of view

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