Linux and Unix wc command tutorial with examples

Tutorial on using wc, a UNIX and Linux command for printing newline, word and byte counts for files. Examples of printing the number of lines in a file, printing the number of characters in a file and printing the number of words in a file.

• March 19, 2011
• Updated September 19, 2024

What is the wc command in UNIX? ¶

The wc command in UNIX is a command line utility for printing newline, word and byte counts for files. It can return the number of lines in a file, the number of characters in a file and the number of words in a file. It can also be combine with pipes for general counting operations.

How to get count information on a file ¶

To get count information on a file use the wc command with no options.

wc /usr/share/dict/words
235886  235886 2493109 /usr/share/dict/words

The output is number of lines, number of words, number of bytes, filename.

How to print the number of lines in a file ¶

To print the number of lines in a file (or more specifically newline counts) use the -l option.

wc -l /usr/share/dict/words
235886 /usr/share/dict/words

How to print the number of characters in a file ¶

To print the number of characters in a file use the -m option.

wc -m /usr/share/dict/words
2493109 /usr/share/dict/words

How to print the number of bytes in a file ¶

To print the number of bytes in a file use the -c option.

wc -c /usr/share/dict/words
2493109 /usr/share/dict/words

How to print the number of words in a file ¶

To print the number of words in a file use the -w option.

wc -w /usr/share/dict/words
235886 /usr/share/dict/words

How to count records in CSV files ¶

To count the number of records (or rows) in several CSV files the wc can used in conjunction with pipes. In the following example there are five CSV files. The requirement is to find out the sum of records in all five files. This can be achieved by piping the output of the cat command to wc.

cat *.csv | wc -l
1866

Done. There are 1866 records across the 5 files.

How to count the number files in a directory ¶

To count the number of folders and files in a directory wc can be combined with the ls command. By passing the -1 options to ls it will list one file per line. This can be piped to wc to give a count.

ls -1 | wc -l
21

Further reading ¶

• wc man page
• The Linux wc command (word count)

Tags

• UNIX
• Linux

Can you help make this article better? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.

See Also

• Linux and Unix head command tutorial with examples
  Nov 3, 2010
  Tutorial on using head, a UNIX and Linux command for outputting the first part of files. Examples of outputting the first ten lines of a file, limiting the number of lines, limiting the number of bytes, showing multiple files and using pipes.

• Linux and Unix tr command tutorial with examples
  Jul 23, 2010
  Tutorial on using tr, a UNIX and Linux command for translating or deleting characters. Examples of converting uppercase to lowercase, deleting specific characters, squeezing repeating patterns and basic finding and replacing.

• Linux and Unix alias command tutorial with examples
  Jul 11, 2008
  How to create shell aliases using bash or zsh to provide shortcuts to common commands