WC(1) | General Commands Manual | WC(1) |
wc
— word, line,
and byte count
wc |
[-c | -m ]
[-Llw ] [file ...] |
The wc
utility displays the number of
lines, words, bytes and characters contained in each input
file (or standard input, by default) to the standard
output. A line is defined as a string of characters delimited by a
<newline> character, and a word is defined as a string of characters
delimited by white space characters. White space characters are the set of
characters for which the
iswspace(3) function returns
true. If more than one input file is specified, a line of cumulative counts
for all the files is displayed on a separate line after the output for the
last file.
The following options are available:
-c
-L
-l
-m
-w
When an option is specified, wc
only
reports the information requested by that option. The default action is
equivalent to all the flags -clw
having been
specified.
The following operands are available:
If no file names are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is displayed.
By default, the standard output contains a line for each input file of the form:
lines words bytes file_name
The wc
utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs.
Historically, the wc
utility was
documented to define a word as a ``maximal string of characters delimited by
⟨space⟩, ⟨tab⟩ or ⟨newline⟩
characters''. The implementation, however, didn't handle non-printing
characters correctly so that `` ^D^E '' counted as 6 spaces, while
``foo^D^Ebar'' counted as 8 characters. 4BSD systems
after 4.3BSD modified the implementation to be
consistent with the documentation. This implementation defines a ``word'' in
terms of the iswspace(3)
function, as required by IEEE Std 1003.2
(“POSIX.2”).
The -L
option is a non-standard extension,
compatible with the -L
option of the GNU and
FreeBSD wc
utilities.
The wc
utility conforms to
IEEE Std 1003.2-1992 (“POSIX.2”).
A wc
utility appeared in
Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
September 1, 2019 | NetBSD 10.99 |