Original author(s) |
Joe Ossanna ( AT&T Bell Laboratories) |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
Initial release | November 3, 1971 |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Unix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno, MSX-DOS, IBM i |
Platform | Cross-platform |
Type | Command |
License | Plan 9, Inferno:
MIT coreutils: GPL-3.0-or-later |
wc
(short for word count) is a command in
Unix,
Plan 9,
Inferno, and
Unix-like
operating systems. 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.
Sample execution of wc:
$ wc foo bar
40 149 947 foo
2294 16638 97724 bar
2334 16787 98671 total
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:
$ grep -r "example" |wc
1071 23337 101349
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.
[1] It appeared in
Version 1 Unix.
[2]
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.
[3]
A wc
command is also part of
ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for
MSX-DOS version 2.
[4]
The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project [5] and the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities. [6]
The wc command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system. [7]
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)wc
Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)Original author(s) |
Joe Ossanna ( AT&T Bell Laboratories) |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
Initial release | November 3, 1971 |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Unix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno, MSX-DOS, IBM i |
Platform | Cross-platform |
Type | Command |
License | Plan 9, Inferno:
MIT coreutils: GPL-3.0-or-later |
wc
(short for word count) is a command in
Unix,
Plan 9,
Inferno, and
Unix-like
operating systems. 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.
Sample execution of wc:
$ wc foo bar
40 149 947 foo
2294 16638 97724 bar
2334 16787 98671 total
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:
$ grep -r "example" |wc
1071 23337 101349
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.
[1] It appeared in
Version 1 Unix.
[2]
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.
[3]
A wc
command is also part of
ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for
MSX-DOS version 2.
[4]
The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project [5] and the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities. [6]
The wc command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system. [7]
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)wc
Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)