Linux WC Command to Count Number of Lines, Words, & Characters

The wc (word count) command is used Linux and Unix systems to count the number of lines, words, characters from one or multiple text files.

Wc is a terminal command and most used in bash shell scripting for line and word counting.

C Program to COUNT Number of LINES ...

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C Program to COUNT Number of LINES in a File | File Handling in C

In the tutorial, we learn how to use Linux wc command with some practical examples.

Wc Command and its Syntax

Below you can find the syntax for wc command.

wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Wc command options to print counts as follows:

-w, --words - Print the number of words.
-c, --bytes - print the byte counts.
-m, --chars - Print the number of characters.
-l, --lines - Print the number of lines.
-L, --max-line-length - Print the length of the longest line.

By default, if wc command is used without any options it will print four columns.

For examples, lets read '/proc/meminfo' using wc command.

$ wc /proc/meminfo
47 137 1307 /proc/meminfo

where,

47 - is the lines count

137 - the word count

1307 - the bytes count

Let check another example, how to find the number of lines in the file using -l option.

$ wc -l /proc/meminfo
47 /proc/meminfo

Count the number of lines

To count the number of lines in a text file we can use -l option. This Line count is the most commonly used option in wc command.

The following examples show how many lines are there in the '/home/linoxide/serverlist.txt' file:

$ wc -l /home/linoxide/serverlist.txt
320 /home/linoxide/serverlist.txt

Count the number of  words

If you like to count the number of words in a file you can use -w followed by the file name.

In the following examples, you can see that the file contains '700' words.

$ wc -w /home/linoxide/serverlist.txt
700 /home/linoxide/serverlist.txt

Count the number of bytes in file

The -c option can be used with wc command to display only the number of bytes in the file.

$ wc -c testfile
60 testfile

Count from multiple files

We can use wc command to take counts from multiple files.

In the following examples wc command read from multiple files:

$ wc sample.txt samplefile.txt
5 9 30 sample.txt
4 7 40 samplefile.txt
9 16 70 total

Use wc command with pipes

The wc command very commonly used with a combination of different commands with pipes. Let's check some examples.

Below one-liner command will count the number of times a word appears in a file:

$ cat file-name | grep -o 'word' | wc -l

To count the number of file and directories in the current directory

$ ls -1 | wc -l
2

To count the number of files in the current directory.

$ find . -type f | wc -l

or

$ find -type f -printf '.' | wc -c

Conclusion

In this tutorial we learned how to use wc command to count number lines, files and words. I hope you enjoyed reading and please leave your suggestions in the comment section.