The wc program can be used in Bash scripts and from the Linux command line to count the number of bytes, characters, words, or lines in a file. Here’s how to use it, with examples.
wc Program Syntax
The syntax for the wc command is as follows:
wc OPTIONS FILE
Note that:
- OPTIONS should be provided from the below table of available options
- FILE is the path to the file which will have the contents counted
- More than one file can be specified
- If more than one file is specified, the total counts for each file will also be displayed
- More than one file can be specified
- By default, the wc command will output the lines, words, characters, and the name of the file
- They will always be output in the same order
wc Options
The following options are available for the wc command – see below for examples of how they are used.
| -c, –bytes | Print byte count |
| -m, –chars | Print character count |
| -l, –lines | Print newline count |
| -L, –max-line-length | Print length of the longest line |
| -w, –words | Print word count |
Additional options are available in the wc documentation.
Bytes, Characters, Words, and Lines
The byte count returned by wc will be the total number of bytes in the file. The number of characters will be the number of characters in the file – numbers, letters, and other symbols.
Words will be counted as the number of congruent runs of characters separated by spaces, while the newline count will display the number of new lines in the file. if more than one file is supplied, the total for each file will be displayed individually.
wc Command Examples
The below examples will use the following text file, called text.txt:
Unknown to man, enormous creatures roam space and time occasionally bumping into things
The below uses the wc commands to get the counts for text.txt:
wc test.txt
This will output:
2 13 87 test.txt
This is the number of newlines, words, characters, and the name of the file.
Note that even though there are 3 lines, there are only two newlines in this file – creating new lines at the end of the first and second lines. There is no newline at the end of the third line!
To show the number of bytes in the file:
wc -c test.txt
Which will output:
87 test.txt
Above, the file is 87 bytes in size. The output of wc will always be terminated with the name of the file
Below, the number of characters, words, and lines are output individually, using options:
wc -m test.txt wc -w test.txt wc -l test.txt
Which will output:
87 test.txt 13 test.txt 2 test.txt
