Let us take a closer look at the fields in the syntax of the wc command:<\/p>\n
1. <options><\/h4>\n
This field takes in a range of options that specify how the wc command should function and print the output.<\/p>\n
2. <files><\/h4>\n
This field takes in the name of the file you want to count the text. You can also specify the path of a specific directory or data stream in this field.<\/p>\n
Options used with the wc command<\/h3>\n
The wc command, unlike most of the commands in Linux, has only a handful of options, to be more specific only 8 (out of which 2 are not considered as options). Let us take a look at them:<\/p>\n
1. -c<\/h4>\n
This option prints the number of bytes. You can also write this option as \u201c–bytes\u201d.<\/p>\n
2. -m<\/h4>\n
This option prints the number of characters. You can also write this option as \u201c–chars\u201d.<\/p>\n
3. -l<\/h4>\n
This option prints the number of lines. You can also write this option as \u201c–bytes\u201d.<\/p>\n
4. -w<\/h4>\n
This option prints the number of words. You can also write this option as \u201c–words\u201d.<\/p>\n
5. -L<\/h4>\n
This line prints the length of the longest line. You can also write this option as \u201c–max-line-length\u201d.<\/p>\n
6. –files0-from=<filename><\/h4>\n
This option reads the input from the file specified by null-terminated names in the file specified by you.<\/p>\n
7. –version<\/h4>\n
This option prints out the information about the wc command you are using in your system and then exits.<\/p>\n
This option prints the help menu as shown below:<\/p>\n We can also run a wc command with no options at all, Here are a couple of examples (for both a file and a datastream):<\/p>\n If you notice carefully, the wc command printed out 3 sets of numbers, let us look at what they represent.<\/p>\n 1. The first number represents the lines.<\/p>\n 2. The second number represents the number of words.<\/p>\n 3. The third number represents the number of characters.<\/p>\n Therefore the data about the CPU information had 104 lines, 640 words, and 3696 characters, whereas the text file \u201ccars2.txt\u201d has 8 lines, 12 words, and 128 characters.<\/p>\n Now that we have laid down the fundamentals let us explore the possibilities of the wc command in the terminal. Let us consider the text file shown below to use the wc command on:<\/p>\n To count the number of lines, pair the wc command with the option \u201c-w\u201d or \u201c–words\u201d as shown in the output below:<\/p>\n To count the number of words, pair the wc command with the option \u201c-l\u201d or \u201c–lines\u201d as shown in the output below:<\/p>\n To count the number of characters or letters, pair the wc command with the option \u201c-c\u201d or \u201c–bytes\u201d as shown in the output below:<\/p>\n To print the number of characters in the longest line, use the wc command with the option \u201c-L\u201d as shown in the output below:<\/p>\n In the above output the line \u201cXUV 500-mahindra\u201d is the longest line which has 16 characters long.<\/p>\n You can also combine the options of the wc command, for example, If you want the wc command to display the total number of lines and the length of the longest line pair the options \u201cl\u201d and \u201cL\u201d as shown below:<\/p>\n Note that in the above example the first number represents the total number of lines and the second number represents the number of characters in the longest line. It will not be printed in any other format, as the wc command follows the following order and no one can change it: newline, word, character, byte, and maximum line length.<\/p>\n To print the total number of words along with the number of characters, pair the options \u201cw\u201d and \u201cc\u201d with the wc command as shown below:<\/p>\n Again, if you notice, the number of words is printed first followed by the number of characters.<\/p>\n You can count the number of lines, words, and characters of more than 1 file in just one wc command, to do so, simply write the filenames one after the other separated by a space as shown below:<\/p>\n After printing the count information of all the files you specify, wc also prints the total at the end.<\/p>\n To print the count information of multiple data streams, simply specify the path one after the other separated by a space as shown below:<\/p>\n Using the wc command we can also count the number of files in a directory. We simply pipe the ls command to the wc command and count the number of lines or words (words as names of files is only one word).<\/p>\n In the above output, the pipe symbol takes in the output of the ls command (which lists the contents of the directory) and passes it as the input of the wc command.<\/p>\n We can pipe the wc command with hundreds of Linux commands to count the information of a specific quantity, let us look at a few examples:<\/p>\n To printout the number of user accounts, pipe the \u201cgetent passwd\u201d command with the wc command and count the number of lines as shown:<\/p>\n The option \u201c–files0-from=<filename>\u201d allows the wc command to read the input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in the file you specified. If the file you specified is \u201c-\u201d (as shown in the output below), the wc command will read names from the standard input (STDIN).<\/p>\n For example, you can search for files using the find command and provide those files to the wc command by piping them as shown below:<\/p>\n![\"version](\"https:\/\/data-flair.training\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/08\/version-of-the-wc-command.webp\")
<\/a><\/p>\n8. –help<\/h4>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nUnderstanding output of Linux wc command<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nCounting the number of words<\/h3>\n
wc -w <file><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/h3>\nCounting the number of lines<\/h3>\n
wc -l <file><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/h3>\nCounting the number of characters<\/h3>\n
wc -c <file><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/h3>\nFinding the length of the longest line<\/h3>\n
wc -L <file><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPrinting the number of lines and length of the longest line<\/h3>\n
wc -lL <file><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPrinting the total number of words and characters<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nDisplaying the count information of multiple files<\/h3>\n
wc <file1> <file2> <file3><\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nDisplaying the count information of multiple data streams<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nCounting the number of files in a directory<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nCounting the number of users<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nCounting the \u201c–files0-from=<f>\u201d option<\/h3>\n