wc Command Examples

Count lines, words, and bytes. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/wc-invocation.html.

• Count all lines in a file:

wc {{[-l|--lines]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Count all words in a file:

wc {{[-w|--words]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Count all bytes in a file:

wc {{[-c|--bytes]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Count all characters in a file (taking multi-byte characters into account):

wc {{[-m|--chars]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Count all lines, words and bytes from stdin:

{{find .}} | wc

• Count the length of the longest line in number of characters:

wc {{[-L|--max-line-length]}} {{path/to/file}}