Counting lines, words, characters in text files with Linux with wc

This post was originally published on go2linux.org, a Linux blog I ran from 2007 to 2011. The domain is no longer mine, but I am the original author. I am republishing it here on garron.me with corrections and improvements.

There are a lot of useful tools in Linux and wc is one of them, this tool let us know the number of:

Lines, words or characters that we could find in a text file, its use is very simple:

Usage

wc [OPTION]… [FILE]…

Where the options are

-c, --bytes
 print the byte counts

-m, --chars
 print the character counts

-l, --lines
 print the newline counts

-L, --max-line-length
 print the length of the longest line

-w, --words
 print the word counts

For example

Suppose you have a file called mytextfile.txt and would like to know how many lines and words it have just enter:

wc -l -w mytextfile.txt

The output will be like this.

7334  22002 /home/user/mytextfile.txt

So it has 7334 lines and 22002 words.