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What does the wc command in Linux mean?
The wc command stands for “word count” and has a quite simple syntax. It allows you to count the number of lines, words, bytes, and characters in one or multiple text files. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.
How to see the number of lines in a WC file?
When you use wc without any options it will print three different numbers followed by the name of the input file. The first column shows the numbers of lines in the file. The second columns is the word count. The third column is the character count. There are a few options to select which output you want to see.
Is the byte count equal to the character Count?
In most ASCII text files the byte count will equal the character count. Print the Length of the Longest Line in a File A rarely used option is -L (–max-line-length). It will print the number of characters in the longest line of the file.
How to count number of words in a file?
Count Number of Words in a File Similarly, you can print the number of words in a file using the -w (–words) option. [[email protected]~]$ wc -w Harrison_Bergeron.txt 2222 Harrison_Bergeron.txt Count the Number of Characters in a File You can also count the number of characters in a file using the -m (–chars) option like so:
How is the wc command used in piping?
The wc command can be used in combination with other commands through piping. Here are a few examples. The find command passes a list of all files in the current directory with each file name on a single line to the wc command, which counts the number of lines and prints the result:
How to use WC to search for files?
The –files0-from=F option allows wc to read input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in file F. If F is – then read names from standard input. For example, you can search for files using the find command and provide those files as an input to wc: