1. Open the Terminal. (on macOs, you can use Spotlight with keyboard shortcut + Space)
    Open Terminal using Mac Spotlight
    Open Terminal using Mac Spotlight
  2. Move terminal working directory to the folder containing your CSV file. Use ls to show current directory files and folders and cd to move inside a folder.
  3. Enter the following command. Replace filepath with your CSV file path:
wc -l filepath.csv
  1. The line count will be printed before the file name
    Word Count Command
    Word Count Command

The wc command is used to count the number of words or lines (with the -l option) in a file. In a CSV file, each line is a data record. Counting the number of rows is an easy way to have the number of records in your CSV file.

Get the number of rows containing a keyword in a CSV file

If you want to filter rows in your CSV file and count the matching lines, combine wc with the command grep.

grep "keyword" filepath.csv | wc -l
Filter and Count Lines
Filter and Count Lines

You can also search for multiple keywords with grep using a regular expression (the -E option is for --extended-regexp). Any line with at least one of the keywords will be counted.

grep -E "keyword1|keyword2" filepath.csv | wc -l
Filter and Count Lines with multiple keywords
Filter and Count Lines with multiple keywords

By default, grep is case sensitive (uppercase and lowercase characters are distinct). To ignore case in the search, add the -i (for --ignore-case) in your command:

grep -i "keyword" filepath.csv | wc -l

or

grep -i -E "keyword1|keyword2" filepath.csv | wc -l

Get the number of rows of multiple CSV files

To have the sum of the rows of all the CSV files in the current folder, use the following command:

cat *.csv | wc -l
Get the sum of all csv files
Get the sum of all csv files

To view the content of your CSV file, you can uses an online CSV editor.