wc(1) [osx 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

Check Out this Related Man Page

PASTE(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						  PASTE(1)

NAME

     paste -- merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files

SYNOPSIS

     paste [-s] [-d list] file ...

DESCRIPTION

     The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input files, replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a
     single tab character, and writes the resulting lines to standard output.  If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files
     still contain data, the file is treated as if it were an endless source of empty lines.

     The options are as follows:

     -d list	 Use one or more of the provided characters to replace the newline characters instead of the default tab.  The characters in list
		 are used circularly, i.e., when list is exhausted the first character from list is reused.  This continues until a line from the
		 last input file (in default operation) or the last line in each file (using the -s option) is displayed, at which time paste
		 begins selecting characters from the beginning of list again.

		 The following special characters can also be used in list:

		 
    newline character
		 	    tab character
		 \    backslash character
		     Empty string (not a null character).

		 Any other character preceded by a backslash is equivalent to the character itself.

     -s 	 Concatenate all of the lines of each separate input file in command line order.  The newline character of every line except the
		 last line in each input file is replaced with the tab character, unless otherwise specified by the -d option.

     If '-' is specified for one or more of the input files, the standard input is used; standard input is read one line at a time, circularly,
     for each instance of '-'.

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

SEE ALSO

     cut(1)

STANDARDS

     The paste utility is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'') compatible.

BSD
								   June 6, 1993 							       BSD

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wc(1) [osx man page]

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