The program reads either standard input or a list of files and generates one or more of the following statistics: newline count, word count, and byte count. If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.
Sample execution of wc:
wc file1.txt file2.txt
will output:
40 149 947 file1.txt
2294 16638 97724 file2.txt
2334 16787 98671 total
The first column is the count of newlines, meaning that the text file
file1.txt has 40 newlines while bar has 2294 newlines-
resulting in a total
of 2334 newlines. The second column indicates the number of words in each
text file showing that there are 149 words in file1.txt
and 16638 words in
file2.txt – giving a total of 16787 words. The last
column indicates the
number of characters in each text file, meaning that the file
file1.txt has
947 characters while bar has 97724 characters – 98671 characters all
in all.
wc -l file1.txt
prints the line count (note that if the last line does not have \n, it will not be counted).
wc -c file1.txt
prints the byte count.
wc -m file1.txt
prints the character count
wc -L file1.txt
prints the length of longest line (GNU extension)
wc -w file1.txt
prints the word count.