UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

That's pretty close, really.

Use wc -c to print the number of characters instead of lines.

Code:

head -1 file_nam  | wc -m

So, is the character count is 51 or 50..
Do we report the line feed?

wc -c, not wc -m. For ASCII text, you want bytes. The difference is small but important.

wc will include the line feed in the length, yes.

If the task is to count characters, then -m should be used. Of course, to count characters correctly, the effective locale must be consistent with the file's contents.

Regards,
Alister

No, you absolutely do not want variable-sized characters when considering how many bytes to read.

For a moment there I thought I was going to learn something fundamental, but it seems we simply interpreted the task differently.

I don't see anything specifying bytes. From the thread's title to every relevant instance in OP text, the word "character" is used.

Your interpretation of the OP's requirements may be correct, but there's nothing in the text that supports t.

In practice, though, the difference is almost certainly academic.

Regards,
Alister

The only extant system I know where the system's character size is anything but 8-bit is Windows CE 3/4. (And perhaps newer.) And even it specifies reads in bytes, not characters.