WC Linux – (Count Lines, Words, Characters ) in Linux with best examples
WC command in the Linux/ Unix world is used to find out the Number of Lines, Characters, and words. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use this command with examples.
Step 1: WC Command Basic Usage
If we don’t parse any parameters while use “wc ” command, then it will display “number of lines”, “number of words” and “number of bytes” of a file. Execute the following command to get the information from myserverfix.txt file.
wc myservefix.txt
the output of this command is the following:
11 16 1500 myserverfix.txt
In the output
- 11 is the number of lines.
- 16 is the number of words.
- 1500 is the number of bytes.
Step 2: Count Number of Words in a File
To count the number of words in a file, we need to pass an additional parameter ‘w’ with the command. which is the following.
wc -w myserverfix.txt
the output of this command
22 myserver.txt
Here 22 is the number of words in the myserver.txt file.
Step 3: Count Number of Lines in a File.
To count the number of lines in a file, we need to parse another parameter in the “wc” command. Execute the following command in the terminal.
wc -l myserverfix.txt
The output of this command is following.
22 myserverfix.txt
Here 22 is the number of lines in the file.
Step 4: Check Number of Characters in a File.
To check the number of characters in a file execute the ‘wc’ command with -c parameters. This will display the information, execute the following command.
wc -c myserverfix.txt
The output of this command is following.
134 myserverfix.txt
Step 5: Check the Length of the Longest line in a file.
wc -L myserverfix.txt
It will display the length of the Longest Line in a File. However, if you want to explore more options that WC command provides, just execute the following command in the terminal.
wc --help
The output of this command is going to be the following.
Usage: wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...
or: wc [OPTION]... --files0-from=F
Print newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE, and a total line if
more than one FILE is specified. With no FILE, or when FILE is -,
read standard input.
-c, --bytes print the byte counts
-m, --chars print the character counts
-l, --lines print the newline counts
-L, --max-line-length print the length of the longest line
-w, --words print the word counts
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit
The Linux WC command is very helpful when we are using it with the bash scripts and other commands. If you liked this article do check out our other articles.