linecount

Counts the number of lines in a text file

By knowing the number of lines in a text file that you want to read, you can do more advanced file I/O reads efficiently. For example if you want to use textscan to read a block of data at once. Skip several lines, then read another block of data. Repeating this until the EOF.

Another scenario is if you want to read just the Nth line from the EOF, but you don't know what line that is to know how many headerlines you want to skip