Estimate the number of lines in a file.

## Project description

lcw is like wc -l but faster, less precise, and equally accurate.

usage: lcw [-h] [--sample-size N] [--page-size PAGE_SIZE] [--just-ml] file

Estimate how many lines are in a file.

positional arguments:
file

optional arguments:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit
--sample-size N, -n N
How many pages to count (default: 1000)
--page-size PAGE_SIZE, -p PAGE_SIZE
Size of an observation (default: 16384)
--just-ml, -j         Only print the maximum likelihood estimate (default:
False)


## Speed

It’s faster than wc -l on big files.

$wc -c big-file.csv 1071895374 big-file.csv$ time lcw big-file.csv
2386238 ± 22903 lines (99% confidence)

real    0m0.172s
user    0m0.140s
sys     0m0.027s

\$ time wc -l big-file.csv
2388430 big-file.csv

real    0m1.379s
user    0m1.170s
sys     0m0.197s


## Math

lcw uses elementary statistics to perform unbiased estimates of the number of lines in a file. It takes a random sample of “pages” within the file and counts how many newlines are in each page.

It multiplies the average count by the number of pages in the file in order to get its best guess at the number of lines in the file (the maximum likelihood estimate) and then computes a 99% normal confidence interval, applying a finite population correction for the estimate the standard deviation of sample totals.

## Tuning

It is best to use the page size that your storage medium uses; modern storage media read entire pages at once, so using a page size that is too small will be bad for performance.

The sample size is set with -n, and typical rules of thumb say that this should be at least 20 for the confidence level to be valid. The page size is set with -p and should be something like 2048, 4096, 8192, or 16384.

## Project details

Uploaded source