nl(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

NL(1)                         User Commands                        NL(1)

NAME         top

       nl - number lines of files

SYNOPSIS         top

       nl [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION         top

       Write each FILE to standard output, with line numbers added.

       With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short
       options too.

       -b, --body-numbering=STYLE
              use STYLE for numbering body lines

       -d, --section-delimiter=CC
              use CC for logical page delimiters

       -f, --footer-numbering=STYLE
              use STYLE for numbering footer lines

       -h, --header-numbering=STYLE
              use STYLE for numbering header lines

       -i, --line-increment=NUMBER
              line number increment at each line

       -l, --join-blank-lines=NUMBER
              group of NUMBER empty lines counted as one

       -n, --number-format=FORMAT
              insert line numbers according to FORMAT

       -p, --no-renumber
              do not reset line numbers for each section

       -s, --number-separator=STRING
              add STRING after (possible) line number

       -v, --starting-line-number=NUMBER
              first line number for each section

       -w, --number-width=NUMBER
              use NUMBER columns for line numbers

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

       Default options are: -bt -d'\:' -fn -hn -i1 -l1 -n'rn' -s<TAB>
       -v1 -w6

       CC are two delimiter characters used to construct logical page
       delimiters; a missing second character implies ':'.  As a GNU
       extension one can specify more than two characters, and also
       specifying the empty string (-d '') disables section matching.

       STYLE is one of:

       a      number all lines

       t      number only nonempty lines

       n      number no lines

       pBRE   number only lines that contain a match for the basic
              regular expression, BRE

       FORMAT is one of:

       ln     left justified, no leading zeros

       rn     right justified, no leading zeros

       rz     right justified, leading zeros

AUTHOR         top

       Written by Scott Bartram and David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS         top

       GNU coreutils online help:
       <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report any translation bugs to
       <https://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+:
       GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute
       it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO         top

       Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/nl>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) nl invocation'

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project
       can be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you
       have a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball coreutils-9.4.tar.xz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/⟩ on 2023-12-22.  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

GNU coreutils 9.4              August 2023                         NL(1)