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, 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 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.

     -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.

     -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 specifying the
     -c, -l and -w options.

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

ENVIRONMENT

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

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

DIAGNOSTICS

     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'').

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
								   June 13, 2002							       BSD