Wc (Unix)

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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: number of bytes, number of words, and number of lines (specifically, the number of newline characters). If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.

Sample execution of wc:

$ wc ideas.txt excerpt.txt 
     40     149     947 ideas.txt
   2294   16638   97724 excerpt.txt
   2334   16787   98671 total

The first column is the count of lines, the second column is words, and the last column is number of characters.

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 is part of the GNU textutils package.

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Usage

   wc -l <filename> print the line count
   wc -c <filename> print the byte count
   wc -m <filename> print the character count
   wc -L <filename> print the length of longest line
   wc -w <filename> print the word count

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