nl

A utility for numbering lines, either from a file, or from standard input.

• Number non-blank lines in a file:

nl {file}

• Read from standard output:

cat {file} | nl {options} -

• Number only the lines with printable text:

nl -t {file}

• Number all lines including blank lines:

nl -b a {file}

• Number only the body lines that match a basic regular expression (BRE) pattern:

nl -b p'FooBar[0-9]' {file}

Copyright © 2014—present the tldr-pages team and contributors.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).