count lines in a compressed file

You can obviously not count newlines if the file is still compressed. But you can decompress to a stream, and count the newlines in that stream, without ever writing the (decompressed) file to disk. That would go something like so: zcat for decompress & cat, wc for wordcount. See man pages for both if you want to know more. EDIT If you do not have zcat, zcat is just another name for .