NAME
wc —
word, line, and byte count
SYNOPSIS
wc |
[-c | -m]
[-Llw]
[file ...] |
DESCRIPTION
The
wc utility displays the number of lines, words, bytes and
characters contained in each input
file (or standard
input, by default) to the standard output. A line is defined as a string of
characters delimited by a <newline> character, and a word is defined as
a string of characters delimited by white space characters. White space
characters are the set of characters for which the
iswspace(3) function returns
true. If more than one input file is specified, a line of cumulative counts
for all the files is displayed on a separate line after the output for the
last file.
The following options are available:
-
-
- -c
- The number of bytes in each input file is written to the
standard output.
-
-
- -L
- The number of characters in the longest line of each input
file is written to the standard output.
-
-
- -l
- The number of lines in each input file is written to the
standard output.
-
-
- -m
- The number of characters in each input file is written to
the standard output.
-
-
- -w
- The number of words in each input file is written to the
standard output.
When an option is specified,
wc only reports the information
requested by that option. The default action is equivalent to all the flags
-clw having been specified.
The following operands are available:
-
-
- file
- A pathname of an input file.
If no file names are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is
displayed.
By default, the standard output contains a line for each input file of the form:
lines words bytes file_name
EXIT STATUS
The
wc utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an
error occurs.
COMPATIBILITY
Historically, the
wc utility was documented to define a word
as a ``maximal string of characters delimited by ⟨space⟩,
⟨tab⟩ or ⟨newline⟩ characters''. The
implementation, however, didn't handle non-printing characters correctly so
that `` ^D^E '' counted as 6 spaces, while ``foo^D^Ebar'' counted as 8
characters.
4BSD systems after
4.3BSD modified the implementation to be consistent
with the documentation. This implementation defines a ``word'' in terms of the
iswspace(3) function, as
required by
IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”).
The
-L option is a non-standard extension, compatible with the
-L option of the GNU and
FreeBSD
wc utilities.
SEE ALSO
iswspace(3)
STANDARDS
The
wc utility conforms to
IEEE Std
1003.2-1992 (“POSIX.2”).