wcl - counting lines with progress indicator or "wc -l" for the impatient

wcl is a replacement for wc -l useful for interactive use with large data files. Like wc -l it counts the number of lines in files and displays the total. Unlike wc -l, wcl displays a progress meter and an estimate of the total number of lines as it progresses.

While in progress, it looks like this:

$ wcl aaaaaaaaaaaaa.dat bbbbbbbbbbbb.dat ccccccccc.dat
31,261,832 aaaaaaaaaaaaa.dat
 11% [bbbbbbbbbbbb.dat] projected line count: 443,486,924

When complete, it looks like this:

$ wcl aaaaaaaaaaaaa.dat bbbbbbbbbbbb.dat ccccccccc.dat
  31,261,832 aaaaaaaaaaaaa.dat
 167,622,458 bbbbbbbbbbbb.dat
 244,602,594 ccccccccc.dat
 443,486,884 total

Installation

Compiling the executable requires a standard installation of OCaml.

$ make
$ make install  # Installation directory defaults to $HOME/bin.

PREFIX and BINDIR are supported, so if you want to install wcl in /usr/local, just do:

$ sudo make PREFIX=/usr/local install

Uninstallation:

$ make uninstall

Known limitations

• progress bar probably doesn't show up properly on Windows (please let me know; I don't have access to a Windows machine)