13
Feb
2014
Counting lines, words and characters with wc
By Eric Downing. Filed in Linux, Shell, Utilities |
There is a simple Linux utility for counting characters, lines and words in files called wc. This allows you to give a file as an argument or a stream and get the counts of the aforementioned items.
wc <filename>
or
cat <filename> | wc
The options that wc accepts
| -c,–bytes | print the byte counts |
| -m,–chars | print the character counts |
| -l,–lines | print the line counts |
| -L,–max-line-length | print the length of the longest line |
| -w,–words | print the word counts |
The ouput with no arguments will be three numbers (words,lines,characters. Otherwise the the number will reflect the argument you have passed.
And if you pass multiple filenames the output displays counts for all files and totals.
>wc -l HelloWorld.java sample.txt
8 HelloWorld.java
25 sample.txt
33 total