Weekly Unix #7 - wc

#linux

wc counts. It can count newlines, bytes, characters and words.

Syntax

wc [option] [input-file]

Option is what do you want to count.

  • -c for bytes
  • -m for chars
  • -w for words
  • -l for new lines (lines)

Let’s first create a test file that we will work on, and then we will start counting.

echo "this is a dummy file.nI am going to see how wc works" > test
$wc -c test
54 test # 54 bytes
$wc -m test
54 test # on my machine locale is UTF-8; so again 54
$wc -w test
12 test # 12 words
$wc -l test
1 test # only one line in the file

We can also have all of them together.

$wc -clw test
1 12 54 test # sequence is always largest to smallest irrespective of the arguments

wc doesn’t work on directories but it does work on binary file for example images. So you can find size of the file in bytes:

$wc -c image.jpg
2343344 image.jpg # Size of file is ~2343kb

Passing -l or -w returns a number but it doesn’t make any sense.

Note 1: The command also reads filenames from a file using --file0-from argument

Note 2: There is a -L option which I have not discussed here. I’ll leave it to you to explore

So this was a simple yet powerful wc command. It has one task, but it does it well.

$wc -w thisblogpost
233 thisblogpost