Starting Useful Commands: wc to Count Aspects of a File

The UNIX wc command is a useful tool for counting the number of lines, words and characters in a file.

In order to demonstrate the wc command, let’s create a text file to give it something to count.

Create a file using the nano editor called fruit.txt

Then populate it with the following line:

Orange

Apple

Pear

Banana

Grape

Select control-x to exit and type y and press enter to save the changes and write the file to disk.

Type ls to list the directory contents and you will see a file called fruit.txt

ls

The following terminal details various wc outputs:

wc fruit.txt gives a full output of the number of lines (5), words (5) and characters (31).
Separate outputs can be obtained by adding additional parameters:

wc -l outputs the number of lines in the fruit.txt file i.e. 5

wc -w outputs the number of words in the fruit.txt file i.e. 5

wc -c outputs the number of characters in the fruit.txt file i.e. 31

Further information on the wc command and its parameters can be found by accessing the following link.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/wc

Or by accessing the manual pages for wc within a terminal session, by typing:

man wc