Yes, that's actually the syntax I use. I had been sort of miffed for so long that there wasn't a simple alternative, the discovery of "wc -c" was a bit of a shock.
I'm not sure that "wc -c" will...
I used to use ls -l cut to detrmine file size, and google searches didn't come up with anything else but 'stat' which doesn't appear on HPUX.
I discovered the humble 'wc -c' which does this job...