In Unix, how do I get the line, word, or character count of a document?

In Unix, to get the line, word, or character count of a document, use the wc command. At the Unix shell prompt, enter: wc filename Replace filename with the file or files for which you want information. For each file, wc will output three numbers. The first is the line count, the second is the word count, and the third is the character count. For example, if you entered wc .login, the output would be something similar to the following: 38 135 847 .login To narrow the focus of your query, use one or more of the following wc options:

Note: In some versions of wc, the  -m  option will not be available or  -c  will report characters. However, in most cases, the values for  -c  and  -m  are equal.

For example, to find out how many bytes are in the .login file, you could enter: wc -c .login

You may also pipe standard output into wc to determine the size of a stream. For example, to find out how many files are in a directory, enter: /bin/ls -l | wc -l

For more information about wc, read its man page. To do this, at the Unix prompt, enter: man wc

At Indiana University, for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems support, see At IU, how do I get support for Linux or Unix?

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