wc (Unix)

wc (short for English w ord c ount) is a by POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification defined command on the command line , in Unix - and Unix-like is implemented systems.

The program reads the standard input or a list of files and uses it to generate one or more statistics: number of lines, number of words or number of characters. When specifying individual files, the output for each file and a summary are generated.

The program can be called up as follows:

 $ wc lorem.txt ipsum.log
      40     149     947 lorem.txt
    2294   16638   97724 ipsum.log
    2334   16787   98671 total

The first column indicates the number of lines. In the example the file has lorem.txt40 lines. The file, ipsum.loghowever, has 2294 lines. The files contain a total of 2334 lines. The second column shows the number of words in the files. The last column shows the number of characters in the files.

Newer versions of wccan differentiate between bytes and characters . This difference is relevant for Unicode characters, which can have several bytes per character. The behavior can be controlled with the -cor -mcommand line switches.

GNU wc was part of the GNU textutils package, but is now part of the GNU coreutils package.

use

• wc -l <filename> Specifies the number of lines (only if followed by a line break)
• wc -c <filename> Indicates the number of bytes
• wc -m <filename> Specifies the number of characters
• wc -L <filename> Specifies the length of the longest lines (GNU extension)
• wc -w <filename> Indicates the number of words

See also

• Unix command

Web links

• wc (1) - Original Unix First Edition manual page for wc.
• The wcCommand by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)