Counting Lines, Words, and Characters with wc

  Counting Lines, Words, and Characters with wc  

When working with text files, you sometimes get a large amount of output. Before deciding which approach works best in a specific case, you might want to have an idea about the amount of text you are dealing with. In that case, the  wc  command is useful. In its output, this command gives three different results: the number of lines, the number of words, and the number of characters.  

[root@rhel7 ~]# 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.  With no FILE, or when FILE is -,
read standard input.  A word is a non-zero-length sequence of characters
delimited by white space.
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 length of the longest line
  -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/>
For complete documentation, run: info coreutils 'wc invocation'
[root@rhel7 ~]# cat wctest |wc -w
4
[root@rhel7 ~]# cat wctest | wc -l
3
[root@rhel7 ~]# cat wctest |wc -c
24
[root@rhel7 ~]# cat wctest |wc -m
24
[root@rhel7 ~]# cat wctest |wc -L
11
[root@rhel7 ~]#