use Perl

• External shell tools (Score:1)

  by srezic (8057)

  ... and it is difficult to get it right. On FreeBSD there is usually some whitespace before the line count, so the regexp has to be changed to /^\s*(\d+)/.

  But the results on my system (amd64-freebsd) look different: using a text file with nearly 200000 lines the wc version makes only about 22 iterations/second, much slower than on your system. The the perl version seems to be faster than on your system: 9/s.
• Invalid result (Score:1)

  by srezic (8057)

  And now I see the trap: Benchmark.pm seems to not count the CPU time from child processes! So it's not 3333/s for the wc version, but only 26.9/s.
• Mmmm (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  sub tr_count {
      local ( $/, $_ ) = \( 2**19 );
      my $c = 0;
      open my $in, "<", $file;
      $c += y/\n// while <$in>;
      return $c;
  }

  Only slightly slower than wc on my machine.