wc(1) [hpux man page]

wc(1)							      General Commands Manual							     wc(1)

NAME

       wc - count words, lines, and bytes or characters in a file

SYNOPSIS

       [file]...

DESCRIPTION

       The  command  counts lines, words, and bytes or characters in the named files, or in the standard input if no file names are specified.	It
       also keeps a total count for all named files.

       A word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, or newlines.

   Options
       recognizes the following options:

	      Report the number of bytes in each input file.

	      Report the number of newline characters in each input file.

	      Report the number of characters in each input file.

	      Report the number of words in each input file.

       The and options are mutually exclusive.	Otherwise, the and or options can be used in any combination to specify that a	subset	of  lines,
       words, and bytes or characters are to be reported.

       When any option is specified, reports only the information requested.  If no option is specified, the default output is

       When a file is specified on the command line, its name is printed along with the counts.

   Standard Output
       By default, the standard output contains an entry for each input file in the form:

	      newlines words bytes file

       If the option is specified, the number of characters replaces the bytes field in this format.

       If any option is specified, the fields for the unspecified options are omitted.

       If no file operand is specified, neither the file name nor the preceding blank character is written.

       If  more than one file operand is specified, an additional line is written at the end of the output, of the same format as the other lines,
       except that the word (in the POSIX locale) is written instead of a file name and the total of each column is written as appropriate.

       Under UNIX Standard environment, a word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, newline,  carriage-return,	vertical  tab,	or
       form-feed.

RETURN VALUE

       exits with one of the following values:

	      Successful completion.
	      An error occurred.

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

       For information about the UNIX Standard environment, see standards(5).

   Environment Variables
       determines the range of graphics and space characters, and the interpretation of text as single- and/or multibyte characters.

       determines the language in which messages are displayed.

       If or is not specified in the environment or is null, they default to the value of

       If is not specified or is null, it defaults to (see lang(5)).

       If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting, they all default to See environ(5).

   International Code Set Support
       Single- and multibyte character code sets are supported.  with a newline character, the count will be off by one.

WARNINGS

       The  command counts the number of newlines to determine the line count.	If a text file has a final line that is not terminated with a new-
       line character, the count will be off by one.

EXAMPLES

       Print the number of words and characters in

       The following is printed when the above command is executed:

       where words is the number of words and chars is the number of characters in

SEE ALSO

       standards(5).

STANDARDS CONFORMANCE

																	     wc(1)

Check Out this Related Man Page

WC(1)							    BSD General Commands Manual 						     WC(1)

NAME

     wc -- word, line, character, and byte count

SYNOPSIS

     wc [-clmw] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The wc utility displays the number of lines, words, and bytes contained in each input file, or standard input (if no file is specified) to
     the standard output.  A line is defined as a string of characters delimited by a <newline> character.  Characters beyond the final <newline>
     character will not be included in the line count.

     A word is defined as a string of characters delimited by white space characters.  White space characters are the set of characters for which
     the iswspace(3) function returns true.  If more than one input file is specified, a line of cumulative counts for all the files is displayed
     on a separate line after the output for the last file.

     The following options are available:

     -c      The number of bytes in each input file is written to the standard output.	This will cancel out any prior usage of the -m option.

     -l      The number of lines in each input file is written to the standard output.

     -m      The number of characters in each input file is written to the standard output.  If the current locale does not support multibyte
	     characters, this is equivalent to the -c option.  This will cancel out any prior usage of the -c option.

     -w      The number of words in each input file is written to the standard output.

     When an option is specified, wc only reports the information requested by that option.  The order of output always takes the form of line,
     word, byte, and file name.  The default action is equivalent to specifying the -c, -l and -w options.

     If no files are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is displayed.  The prompt will accept input until receiving EOF, or
     [^D] in most environments.

ENVIRONMENT

     The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of wc as described in environ(7).

EXIT STATUS

     The wc utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

     Count the number of characters, words and lines in each of the files report1 and report2 as well as the totals for both:

	   wc -mlw report1 report2

COMPATIBILITY

     Historically, the wc utility was documented to define a word as a ``maximal string of characters delimited by <space>, <tab> or <newline>
     characters''.  The implementation, however, did not handle non-printing characters correctly so that ``  ^D^E  '' counted as 6 spaces, while
     ``foo^D^Ebar'' counted as 8 characters.  4BSD systems after 4.3BSD modified the implementation to be consistent with the documentation.  This
     implementation defines a ``word'' in terms of the iswspace(3) function, as required by IEEE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'').

SEE ALSO

     iswspace(3)

STANDARDS

     The wc utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

HISTORY

     A wc command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.

BSD
								 February 23, 2005							       BSD

Linux and UNIX Man Pages

wc(1) [hpux man page]

Check Out this Related Man Page