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

NAME

     wc -- word, line, and byte count

SYNOPSIS

     wc [-c | -m] [-Llw] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The wc utility displays the number of lines, words, bytes and characters contained in each input file (or standard input, by default) to the
     standard output.  A line is defined as a string of characters delimited by a <newline> character, and a word is defined as a string of char-
     acters 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 out-
     put for the last file.

     The following options are available:

     -c      The number of bytes in each input file is written to the standard output.

     -L      The number of characters in the longest line of each input file is written to the standard output.

     -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.

     -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 default action is equivalent to all the flags
     -clw having been specified.

     The following operands are available:

     file    A pathname of an input file.

     If no file names are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is displayed.

     By default, the standard output contains a line for each input file of the form:

	   lines    words  bytes   file_name

EXIT STATUS

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

SEE ALSO

     iswspace(3)

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, didn't 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'').

     The -L option is a non-standard extension, compatible with the -L option of the GNU and FreeBSD wc utilities.

STANDARDS

     The wc utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.2-1992 (``POSIX.2'').

BSD
								 February 18, 2010							       BSD