WC(1) General Commands Manual WC(1)NAME
wc - word count
SYNOPSIS
wc [ -lwc ] [ name ... ]
DESCRIPTION
Wc counts lines, words and characters in the named files, or in the standard input if no name appears. A word is a maximal string of char-
acters delimited by spaces, tabs or newlines.
If the optional argument is present, just the specified counts (lines, words or characters) are selected by the letters l, w, or c.
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wc(1) General Commands Manual wc(1)NAME
wc - count words, lines, and bytes or characters in a file
SYNOPSIS
[file]...
DESCRIPTION
The command counts lines, words, and bytes or characters in the named files, or in the standard input if no file names are specified. It
also keeps a total count for all named files.
A word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, or newlines.
Options
recognizes the following options:
Report the number of bytes in each input file.
Report the number of newline characters in each input file.
Report the number of characters in each input file.
Report the number of words in each input file.
The and options are mutually exclusive. Otherwise, the and or options can be used in any combination to specify that a subset of lines,
words, and bytes or characters are to be reported.
When any option is specified, reports only the information requested. If no option is specified, the default output is
When a file is specified on the command line, its name is printed along with the counts.
Standard Output
By default, the standard output contains an entry for each input file in the form:
newlines words bytes file
If the option is specified, the number of characters replaces the bytes field in this format.
If any option is specified, the fields for the unspecified options are omitted.
If no file operand is specified, neither the file name nor the preceding blank character is written.
If more than one file operand is specified, an additional line is written at the end of the output, of the same format as the other lines,
except that the word (in the POSIX locale) is written instead of a file name and the total of each column is written as appropriate.
Under UNIX Standard environment, a word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, newline, carriage-return, vertical tab, or
form-feed.
RETURN VALUE
exits with one of the following values:
Successful completion.
An error occurred.
EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
For information about the UNIX Standard environment, see standards(5).
Environment Variables
determines the range of graphics and space characters, and the interpretation of text as single- and/or multibyte characters.
determines the language in which messages are displayed.
If or is not specified in the environment or is null, they default to the value of
If is not specified or is null, it defaults to (see lang(5)).
If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting, they all default to See environ(5).
International Code Set Support
Single- and multibyte character code sets are supported. with a newline character, the count will be off by one.
WARNINGS
The command counts the number of newlines to determine the line count. If a text file has a final line that is not terminated with a new-
line character, the count will be off by one.
EXAMPLES
Print the number of words and characters in
The following is printed when the above command is executed:
where words is the number of words and chars is the number of characters in
SEE ALSO standards(5).
STANDARDS CONFORMANCE wc(1)
I had received a complaint recently that 'wc' is not returning a correct byte count for large files (in 10s of GB). Does 'wc' have any such limitation? If yes, would 'ls' be a better option to fetch file size.
I am planning on replacing wc with ls for calculating file sizes in the existing code.... (13 Replies)
Hey my friend was asking me if i knew a way to cout how many different words in a file. I told him no not off hand, but i was thinking about it, and i started to wonder also. I imagine this is probably pretty simple im just missing something, I keep confusing my self with how you would compair and... (16 Replies)
Hi,
This might be a very basic question but i am begineer with UNIX. The output of wc -l gives the line count along with the filename.
$ wc -l compare_output.dat > test.dat
$ more test.dat
10 compare_output.dat
I just want the digit 10 in this sceniro. Can anyone plez help me on... (15 Replies)
Hi all i have a syntax , Can some one please give me a script
1, I need to check and execute the command.
ps -ef | grep java | wc -l
5
Output should me 5
if not have to run the command:
ps -ef | grep java
the following java process... (11 Replies)
Hi there,
I'd like to find a way to display a string and count the words in it.
supernova:~# echo 'hello world' | tee - | wc
Unfortunately, this doesn't work.
Any idea?
Thanks in advance.
Santiago (15 Replies)
Hi all,
I need to count the number of lines in all the files under a directory (several levels deep). I am feeling extremely dumb, but I don't know how to do that. Needless to say, I am not a shell script wiz... Any advice?
thanks in advance! (13 Replies)
Hi guys!
I need to cut first row from a file (using awk) without the record separator character (in my case its MS-DOS 0D0A) and field separator character (in my case ; 3B) and put it in another file.
Can you help with that?
Regards,
PsmakR (18 Replies)
Hi techies ..
This is my first posting hr ..
Am facing a serious performance problem in counting the number of lines in the file. The input files i get will be in some 10 to 15 Gb of size or even sometimes more ..and I will load it to db
I have used wc -l to confirm whether the loader... (14 Replies)
I have to create a Perl script which will transpose the data output from my experiment, from columns to rows, in order for me to analyse the data.
I am a complete Perl novice so any help would be greatly appreciated.
The data as it stands looks like this:
Subject Condition Fp1 ... (12 Replies)
Hi, I am facing issue with cut and wc. here is the sample.
the data in file -
tail -1 05_19_BT_TBL_LOAD_20120524064242.bad|cut -c9-58
WatsSaver - AGGREGATED PLAN1581 CALLS FOR 2872.6
tail -1 05_19_BT_TBL_LOAD_20120524064242.bad|cut -c9-58|wc -c
51
tail -1... (12 Replies)
Hey All,
Quick question...
I'm writing a short script to check if a continuous port is running on a server.
I'm using "ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep processName" and I was wondering if it was better/more reliable to just check the
return code from the command or if its better to pipe to... (12 Replies)
Hallo Friends,
I have +/- 800K files that i need to go through. The files have extention .csv
The script that i need should read field number 14 and if field number 14 is equal to 6010 or 2345 or 5690 or 8670 or 4567 then i need to know the total count.
... (17 Replies)
On AIX When I Run the commands below I get -
cat tt11.ksh
#!/bin/ksh
ps -eaf |grep tt11.ksh|grep -v grep|wc -l
count=`ps -eaf |grep tt11.ksh|grep -v grep|wc -l`
echo "value of count is $count"
Output (what I expected)
./tt11.ksh
1
value of count is 1
When I Run... (12 Replies)
Im repeating same command to get count, filename from 4 different files, writing to one same file.
awk 'END{print NR"|"FILENAME}' file.txt >> temp.txt;
awk 'END{print NR"|"FILENAME}' asdf.txt >> temp.txt;
awk 'END{print NR"|"FILENAME}' lkjh.txt >> temp.txt;
awk 'END{print NR"|"FILENAME}'... (12 Replies)
I have a directory of files, I can show the number of lines in each file and order them from lowest to highest with:
wc -l *|sort
15263 Image.txt
16401 reference.txt
40459 richtexteditor.txt
How can I also print the number of unique lines in each file?
15263 1401 Image.txt
16401... (15 Replies)