NL(1)

💖 NL(1) — numbering lines of files, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie so you know that thing where you've got a file and you're like "hmm what if every line had a little number next to it"? that's nl, and it's from the General Commands Manual. she's giving very much "annotated homework" energy and honestly? we're obsessed. ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

nl — number the lines of files. that's it. that's the whole job. she does one thing and she does it flawlessly.

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

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

yes literally that's it. options then files, the classic lil combo. 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Number lines of files.

that's the tea. she numbers. lines. of files. iconic behavior, no notes fr fr.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --help — prints help info so you're not out here lost in the sauce 🙈
• -b, --body-numbering <STYLE> — tell her which STYLE to use when numbering the body lines
• -d, --section-delimiter <CC> — use CC as the thing that separates your logical pages
• -f, --footer-numbering <STYLE> — use STYLE for numbering the footer lines
• -h, --header-numbering <STYLE> — use STYLE for numbering the header lines
• -i, --line-increment <NUMBER> — how much the line number jumps up at each line
• -l, --join-blank-lines <NUMBER> — a group of NUMBER empty lines gets counted as just one
• -n, --number-format <FORMAT> — drop the line numbers in according to FORMAT

possible values are:

• ln
• rn
• rz

• -p, --no-renumber — do not reset the line numbers at logical pages
• -s, --number-separator <STRING> — stick STRING after the (possible) line number
• -v, --starting-line-number <NUMBER> — what number each logical page starts on
• -w, --number-width <NUMBER> — give the line numbers NUMBER columns to live in
• -V, --version — prints the version, obvi

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🌈 EXTRA 🌈

STYLE is one of:

• a — number all the lines
• t — number only the nonempty lines (the only-valid-ones vibe)
• n — number no lines, king of doing nothing
• pBRE — number only the 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

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💜 VERSION 💜

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

okay this is the part where it gets good. the tldr-pages girlies really came through with these.

Number non-blank lines in a file:

nl path/to/file

Read from stdin:

command | nl -

Number [a]ll [b]ody lines including blank lines or do [n]ot number [b]ody lines:

nl -b a|n path/to/file

Number only the [b]ody lines that match a basic regex (BRE) [p]attern:

nl -b p'FooBar[0-9]' path/to/file

Use a specific [i]ncrement for line numbering:

nl -i increment path/to/file

Specify the line numbering format to [r]ight or [l]eft justified, keeping leading [z]eros or [n]ot:

nl -n rz|ln|rn

Specify the line numbering's [w]idth (6 by default):

nl -w col_width path/to/file

Use a specific string to [s]eparate the line numbers from the lines (TAB by default):

nl -s separator path/to/file

bestie. listen. these examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. and also, because uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. not her fault, she's growing. 🫶

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k that's the whole page, my love. this lil queen dropped on 2026-09-25 and she's running on uutils coreutils, so go forth and number some lines. you're gonna slay so hard 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅👑