Wc (Unix)

Template:Short description Template:Lowercase Template:Infobox software Template:Code (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:

<syntaxhighlight lang="console">

$ wc foo bar
     40     149     947 foo
   2294   16638   97724 bar
   2334   16787   98671 total

</syntaxhighlight>

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 barTemplate:Snd 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 charactersTemplate:Snd 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.

Through a pipeline, 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: <syntaxhighlight lang=console> $ grep -r "example" |wc

   1071   23337  101349

</syntaxhighlight>

History

Template:Code 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.<ref>Template:Man</ref> It appeared in Version 1 Unix.<ref>Template:Man</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

A wc command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.<ref>MSX-DOS2 Tools User's Manual by ASCII Corporation</ref>

The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project<ref>CoreUtils for Windows</ref> and the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities.<ref>Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities</ref>

The Template:Mono command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Usage

• wc -c <filename> prints the byte count
• wc -l <filename> prints the line count
• 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.
• Template:Man
• Template:Man
• Template:Man
• The wc Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)