Wc

Internal

• Linux

Options

-l

The number of lines in each input file is written to the standard output.

To get the number of lines from a single file as a number:

cat file.txt | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'

-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.

wc -c somefile.txt | awk '{print $1}'

To test non-zero length file, use bash test -s.

-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.