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 newlines, 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 used to be part of the GNU textutils package, now it's part of GNU coreutils.
[edit] 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
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- [1] The program's manpage
- The wc Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)
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