wc (Unix)
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wc (short for word count) is a command in Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and operating systems that are Unix-like. The program reads either standard input or a list of computer 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.
Example
Sample execution of wc:
The first column is the count of newlines, meaning that the text file foo 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 foo and 16638 words in bar – giving a total of 16787 words. The last column indicates the number of characters in each text file, meaning that the file foo has 947 characters while bar has 97724 characters – 98671 characters all in all.
Newer versions of wc can differentiate between byte and character count. This difference arises with Unicode which includes multi-byte characters. The desired behaviour is selected with the -c or -m options.
Through a pipeline, it can also be used to preview the output size of a command with a potentially large output, without it printing the text into the console:
History
wc is part of the X/Open Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX.1 and the Single Unix Specification. It appeared in Version 1 Unix.
GNU wc used to be part of the GNU textutils package; it is now part of GNU coreutils. The version of wc bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Rubin and David MacKenzie.
A wc command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.
The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project and the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities.
The wc command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.
Usage
wc -c <filename>prints the byte countwc -l <filename>prints the line countwc -m <filename>prints the character countwc -w <filename>prints the word countwc -L <filename>prints the length of the longest line (GNU extension)