Linux wc Command: Count Lines, Words, and Characters in Files

The wc command in Linux shows the lines, words, and number of characters in a file, in that order.

Suppose you want to count the number of lines, words, or characters in a file. The wc command can be used to count the lines, words, and characters of one or more files. If more than one file is passed as an argument, it will display the statistics for each file and the total.

The most common options are:

• -c: Counts the number of characters in one or more files;
• -l: Counts the number of lines in one or more files;
• -L: Counts the number of characters in the longest line of the file;
• -w: Counts the words in one or more files.

In this example, we will use wc to count the unique items in the grocery list:

$ sort supermercado | uniq | wc
      6       6      41

Our list has 6 items (one per line), six words, and 41 characters.

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