I've done timing tests and it is typically on par with tail & wc. The bulk of the time is wasted reading your file into ram, the time it takes to count the lin

I've done timing tests and it is typically on par with tail & wc. The bulk of the time is wasted reading your file into ram, the time it takes to count the lines is essentially 0. Edit: Of course I misspoke, yes tail is much faster for getting the last line of the file! I meant for getting the line count the loop methods is typically just ~5% slower than wc on sufficiently large files.