NAME

wc — Count lines, words, bytes/characters

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

wc reads each given file and by default report their numbers of newlines, words and bytes. If no file is given, then wc reads from standard input.

A word is defined as a non-empty string delimited by whitespace, some other implementation choose to additionally exclude non-printable characters.

OPTIONS

-c

Explicitly use single-byte mode, and write the number of bytes in each file.

-l

Write the number of newlines in each file.

-m

Switch to multi-byte mode, and write the number of codepoints in each file. The encoding is dependent on the locale(1) environment variables.

Note that while codepoints are often close enough to characters, some characters use multiple codepoints, plus by design wc cannot consider glyphs due to lacking rendering.

For example with decomposed é (e with acute diacritic) in a ‘C.UTF-8’ locale:

$ printf '\145\314\201\n'
é
$ printf '\145\314\201' | wc -c
3
$ printf '\145\314\201' | wc -m
2

-w

Write the number of words in each file.

If any option is specified, wc reports only the requested information, without their ordering changing output formatting. The default is equivalent to wc -clw.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See locale(1).

STDOUT

By default the standard output reports each file in the form:

"%d %d %d %s", <newlines>, <words>, <bytes>, <file>

Similarly to GNU and BusyBox, this implementation also makes sure to not print trailing whitespace, which would have to be trimmed in most scripts.

If more than one file is given, a final line is printed with "total" instead of a pathname.

EXIT STATUS

The wc utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

STANDARDS

wc should be compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2024 (“POSIX.1”) specification.

AUTHORS

Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier <contact+utils@hacktivis.me>