wc (Unix)

wc

The wc command
Original author(s)	Joe Ossanna (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developer(s)	Various open-source and commercial developers
Initial release	November 3, 1971 (1971-11-03)
Operating system	Unix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno, MSX-DOS, IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command

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.

Example

Sample execution of wc:

 $ wc foo bar

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.

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 count
• wc -l <filename> prints the line count (note that if the last line does not have \n, it will not be counted)
• wc -m <filename> prints the character count
• wc -w <filename> prints the word count
• wc -L <filename> prints the length of the longest line (GNU extension)

See also

• List of Unix commands

External links

• wc(1) - Original Unix First Edition manual page for wc.
• wc(1) – Linux User Commands Manual
• wc(1) – Plan 9 Programmer's Manual, Volume 1
• wc(1) – Inferno General commands Manual
• The wc Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)