Hi All,

Can any one tell me the reason of following output .

$ wc -l < file1 file5
3 file5

$ wc -l < file5 file1
8 file1

$ cat file1
emp
employee
empty1
empty2
empty3
empty4
empty5
errorfile

$ cat file5
a is nice.
i live in london.
london is nice city.
$

Don't redirect ( do not use the < symbol)

wc -l file1 file2

Thanks Jim for your response.
But my intention is to see behavior of < operator.
As for as i know < should provide file1 and file2
as input to wc -l

But in this case
wc -l < file1 file2

only one file file1 is going as input to wc -l

Input redirection works on only one file, see here: Shell Command Language
To use both files as standard input, you would need to concatenate:

cat file1 file2 | wc -l

thanks I got it.