(short for word count) is a command in

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s. The program reads either

standard input In computer programming, standard streams are interconnected input and output communication channels between a computer program and its environment when it begins execution. The three input/output (I/O) connections are called standard input (stdi ...

or a list of

computer file A computer file is a computer resource for recording data in a computer storage device, primarily identified by its file name. Just as words can be written to paper, so can data be written to a computer file. Files can be shared with and transf ...

s and generates one or more of the following statistics:

newline Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a ...

count,

word count The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text. Word counting may be needed when a text is required to stay within certain numbers of words. This may particularly be the case in academia, legal proceedings, journalism and ...

, and

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

count. If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.

Example

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

and character count. This difference arises with

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whic ...

which includes multi-byte characters. The desired behaviour is selected with the -c or -m options. Through a

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

, 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

History

is part of the

X/Open X/Open group (also known as the Open Group for Unix Systems and incorporated in 1987 as X/Open Company, Ltd.) was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of info ...

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 The term "Research Unix" refers to early versions of the Unix operating system for DEC PDP-7, PDP-11, VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC). History The term ''Researc ...

. GNU wc used to be part of the GNU

textutils The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems. In September 2002, the ''GNU coreutils'' were ...

package; it is now part of GNU

coreutils The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems. In September 2002, the ''GNU coreutils'' were ...

. The version of wc bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Rubin and David MacKenzie. A wc command is also part of

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

's ''MSX-DOS2 Tools'' for

MSX-DOS MSX-DOS is a discontinued disk operating system developed by Microsoft for the 8-bit home computer standard MSX, and is a cross between MS-DOS 1.25 and CP/M-80 2. MSX-DOS MSX-DOS and the extended BASIC with 3½-inch floppy disk support ...

version 2. The command is available as a separate package for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

as part of the

GnuWin32 The G''nu''W''in''32 project provides native ports in the form of executable computer programs, patches, and source code for various GNU and open source tools and software, much of it modified to run on the 32-bit Windows platform. The ports in ...

project and the

UnxUtils UnxUtils is a collection of ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities to native Win32, with executables only depending on the Microsoft C- runtime msvcrt.dll. The collection was last updated externally on April 15, 2003, by Karl M. Syring. The ...

collection of

native Native may refer to: People * Jus soli, citizenship by right of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Native Americans (disambiguation) In arts and entertai ...

Win32 The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations th ...

ports A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

of common GNU Unix-like utilities. The command has also been ported to the

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in ...

operating system.

Usage

*wc -c prints the byte count *wc -l prints the line count *wc -m prints the character count *wc -w prints the word count *wc -L prints the length of the longest line (GNU extension)

References

External links

wc(1) - Original Unix First Edition manual page for wc
* * *

by The Linux Information Project (LINFO) {{Core Utilities commands Unix text processing utilities Unix SUS2008 utilities Plan 9 commands Inferno (operating system) commands IBM i Qshell commands

Example

History

Usage

See also

References

External links