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C program to find number of lines in a file

By IncludeHelp Last updated : March 10, 2024

In this program, we are going to learn how to find total number of lines available in a text file using C program?

Finding number of lines in a file in C

This program will open a file and read file's content character by character and finally return the total number lines in the file. To count the number of lines we will check the available Newline (\n) characters.

File "test.text"

Hello friends, how are you?
This is a sample file to get line numbers from the file.

Program to get/find total number of lines in a file in C

#include <stdio.h>

#define FILENAME "test.txt"

int main()
{
	FILE *fp;
	char ch;
	int linesCount=0;
	
	//open file in read more
	fp=fopen(FILENAME,"r");
	if(fp==NULL)
	{
		printf("File \"%s\" does not exist!!!\n",FILENAME);
		return -1;
	}

	//read character by character and check for new line	
	while((ch=fgetc(fp))!=EOF)
	{
		if(ch=='\n')
			linesCount++;
	}
	
	//close the file
	fclose(fp);
	
	//print number of lines
	printf("Total number of lines are: %d\n",linesCount);
	
	return 0;	
}

Output

Total number of lines are: 2