wc (Unix)

wc (short for word count) is a command in Unix-like operating systems.

The program reads either standard input or a list of files and generates one or more of the following statistics: newline count, word count, and byte count. If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.

Sample execution of wc:

$ wc foo bar
     40     149     947 foo
   2294   16638   97724 bar
   2334   16787   98671 total

The first column is the count of newlines, meaning that the text file foo has 40 newlines while bar has 2294 newlines- resulting in a total of 2334 newlines. The second column indicates the number of words in each text file showing that there are 149 words in foo and 16638 words in bar – giving a total of 16787 words. The last column indicates the number of characters in each text file, meaning that the file foo has 947 characters while bar has 97724 characters – 98671 characters all in all.

Newer versions of wc can differentiate between byte and character count. This difference arises with Unicode which includes multi-byte characters. The desired behaviour is selected with the -c or -m switch.

GNU wc used to be part of the GNU textutils package; it is now part of GNU coreutils.

Usage

wc -l <filename> prints the line count (note that if the last line does not have \n, it will not be counted)
wc -c <filename> prints the byte count
wc -m <filename> prints the character count
wc -L <filename> prints the length of longest line (GNU extension)
wc -w <filename> prints the word count

External links

wc – Commands & Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX® Specification, Issue 7 from The Open Group
wc(1) - Original Unix First Edition manual page for wc.
wc(1) – Linux User Commands Manual
The wc Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste printf sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs yes

Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal expr lp od sleep true and false

List of Unix commands

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/3/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.

wc (Unix)

Usage

See also

External links