6 WC Command Examples to Count Number of Lines, Words, Characters in Linux

The wc (word count) command in Unix/Linux operating systems is used to find out number of newline count, word count, byte and characters count in a files specified by the file arguments. The syntax of wc command as shown below.

# wc [options] filenames

The following are the options and usage provided by the command.

wc -l : Prints the number of lines in a file.
wc -w : prints the number of words in a file.
wc -c : Displays the count of bytes in a file.
wc -m : prints the count of characters from a file.
wc -L : prints only the length of the longest line in a file.

So, let’s see how we can use the ‘wc‘ command with their few available arguments and examples in this article. We have used the ‘tecmint.txt‘ file for testing the commands. Let’s find out the output of the file using cat command as shown below.

[root@tecmint ~]# cat tecmint.txt
Red Hat
CentOS
Fedora
Debian
Scientific Linux
OpenSuse
Ubuntu
Xubuntu
Linux Mint
Pearl Linux
Slackware
Mandriva

1. A Basic Example of WC Command

The ‘wc‘ command without passing any parameter will display a basic result of ”tecmint.txt‘ file. The three numbers shown below are 12 (number of lines), 16 (number of words) and 112 (number of bytes) of the file.

[root@tecmint ~]# wc tecmint.txt
12  16 112 tecmint.txt

2. Count Number of Lines

To count number of newlines in a file use the option ‘-l‘, which prints the number of lines from a given file. Say, the following command will display the count of newlines in a file. In the output the first filed assigned as count and second field is the name of file.

[root@tecmint ~]# wc -l tecmint.txt
12 tecmint.txt

3. Display Number of Words

Using ‘-w‘ argument with ‘wc‘ command prints the number of words in a file. Type the following command to count the words in a file.

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