Wc (Unix)

wc (short for word count) is a command in Unix-like operating systems.

The program takes as its argument either standard input or a list of files. One or more of the following statistics are generated: number of bytes, number of words, and number of lines (specifically, the number of newline characters). If a list of files is provided, both individual and total statistics follow.

The following is a sample execution of wc.

$ wc ideas.txt excerpt.txt 40 149 947 ideas.txt 2294 16638 97724 excerpt.txt 2334 16787 98671 total

Newer versions of wc differentiate between byte and character (computing) count. This makes a difference with the advent of Unicode, which includes multi-byte characters.

GNU wc is part of the GNU textutils package.