If you want to quickly count the number of reads in a fastq file, you can count the total number of line and divide them by 4. However, when you want to generate a nice table for the reads when writing a report, this will be a inconvenience. So, here is my simple bash script that does this job
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then
echo ""
echo "usage: count_fastq.sh [fastq_file1] <fastq_file2> ..|| *.fastq"
echo "counts the number of reads in a fastq file"
echo ""
exit 0
fi
filear=${@};
for i in ${filear[@]}
do
lines=$(wc -l $i|cut -d " " -f 1)
count=$(($lines / 4))
echo -n -e "\t$i : "
echo "$count" | \
sed -r '
:L
s=([0-9]+)([0-9]{3})=\1,\2=
t L'
done