UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello Guys...

I am a newbie to Unix. I am having a requirement, Like in a file, I want to count the number of characters,

I used wc -c and wc -m, But both are giving the byte count instead of character count.

Please help me guys... Its very very urgent.

Really appreciate ur help..

Mahesh..

that's strange. the man page says that -c gives byte count and -m gives character count

Code:

       -c, --bytes
              print the byte counts

       -m, --chars
              print the character counts

what's the character encoding of the file?

the file is like this

cat file1

this is mango
this is banana
this is apple
this is grape
this is pineapple
this is orange
this is watermelon



I used wc -c and wc -m and it is giving the same thing,

Code:

[mraghunandanan@localhost SHANKU]$ wc -c <file1
109
[mraghunandanan@localhost SHANKU]$ wc -m <file1
109
[mraghunandanan@localhost SHANKU]$

Please resolve this problem....

haha, sorry but this is not an issue. I copied and pasted exactly what you had in file1 and ran the same tests and came up with the same results. I also did a stat on it and it IS 109 bytes.

Code:

-bash-3.2$ stat file1
  File: `file1'
  Size: 109             Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file

Of course, some of the information was removed, but just showing that the information is correct, and that there is no error.

Of course the internet is a wonderful tool, so you can start investigating like this..

Google.com - search for bytes (or wikipedia.org and save a step), near the top "Historically, byte size was determined by the number of bits required to represent a single character from a Western character set. ".

Western character set? OH WHAT IN THE HECK IS THAT!? Oh lordy. Time to search the intertubez again. To save you a few steps: ISO/IEC 8859-1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So A-Za-z0-9, most symbols, are going to be in that set (1 byte in size). I've even been testing!

If you want to know the number of characters in the file excluding the line terminating characters which are normally included in "wc -c":

Code:

cat file1 | tr -d '\n' | wc -c

UUOC

Code:

tr -d '\n' < file1| wc -c