wc command help
$ wc --help Usage: wc [OPTION]... [FILE]... or: wc [OPTION]... --files0-from=F Print newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE, and a total line if more than one FILE is specified. A word is a non-zero-length sequence of characters delimited by white space. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. The options below may be used to select which counts are printed, always in the following order: newline, word, character, byte, maximum line length. -c, --bytes print the byte counts -m, --chars print the character counts -l, --lines print the newline counts --files0-from=F read input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in file F; If F is - then read names from standard input -L, --max-line-length print the maximum display width -w, --words print the word counts --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/> Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/wc> or available locally via: info '(coreutils) wc invocation'
command usage
count rows
$ wc -l /usr/share/dict/american-english 99171 /usr/share/dict/american-english
count words
$ wc -w /usr/share/dict/american-english 99171 /usr/share/dict/american-english
count characters
wc -m /usr/share/dict/american-english 938587 /usr/share/dict/american-english
Statistics bytes
wc -c /usr/share/dict/american-english 938848 /usr/share/dict/american-english
Note that the difference between -c and -m is that for multi-byte characters, such as GBK, UTF-8 encoded Chinese, record one in -m, and record multiple in -c, such as the following test, the default encoding of ubuntu is UTF -8, Chinese is 3 bytes
$ echo -n " 123, test " | wc - c 12 $ echo -n " 123, test " | wc - m 8
Count the longest line
$ wc -L /usr/share/dict/american-english 23 /usr/share/dict/american-english
If you only want to get numbers without printing file names, you can use the following two methods. From the perspective of saving memory, the former method is recommended
$ wc -l /usr/share/dict/american-english | awk '{print $1}' 99171 $ cat /usr/share/dict/american-english | wc -l 99171