wc

- display a count of lines, words and characters in a file

Synopsis

/usr/bin/wc

/usr/bin/wc [options][file...]

ksh93

wc [options][file...]

Description

wc reads one or more input files and, by default, for each file writes a line containing the number of NEWLINEs, words, and bytes contained in each file followed by the file name to standard output in that order. A word is defined to be a non-zero length string delimited by isspace(3C) characters.

If more than one file is specified, wc writes a total count for all of the named files with total written instead of the file name.

By default, wc writes all three counts. Options can specified so that only certain counts are written. The -c and -m options are mutually exclusive.

If no file is specified, or if the file is -, wc reads from standard input and no filename is written to standard output. The start of the file is defined as the current offset.

Options

The following options are supported:

-c

--bytes | chars

List the byte counts.

-l

--lines

List the line counts.

-L

--longest-line | max-line-length

List the longest line length.

-m | C

--multibyte-chars

List the character counts.

-q

--quiet

Suppress invalid multibyte character warnings.

-w

--words

List the word counts. Delimiting characters are Extended Unix Code (EUC) characters from any code set defined by isspace(3C).

--help

Prints basic help information.

--man

--html

--nroff

Prints built-in manual page in either plain text, HTML or nroff format.

--version

Prints version information.

If no option is specified, the default is -lwc (counts lines, words, and bytes.)

Operands

The following operand is supported:

file

A path name of an input file. If no file operands are specified, the standard input is used.

Usage

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of wc when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2³¹ bytes).

Environment Variables

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of wc: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

Exit Status

0

Successful completion.

>0

An error occurred.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

See Also

cksum(1), ksh93(1), isspace(3C), iswalpha(3C), iswspace(3C), setlocale(3C), attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5), standards(5)