How to extract a column from a windows output?

We have C:\Temp>wc -l c:\temp\files.txt | tee count.txt

8 c:\temp\files.txt

We like to get the first column (eg 8).

How do we extract that output number from the console and count.txt for use in other conditional check in our simple windows script?

Thanks

1 Answer

Solved it myself with the following:

cut -f1 -d" " count.txt