wc
Thewc command
Original authors	Joe Ossanna (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developers	Variousopen-source andcommercial developers
Initial release	November 3, 1971; 54 years ago (1971-11-03)
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix,Unix-like,V,Plan 9,Inferno,MSX-DOS,IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command
License	Plan 9, Inferno:MIT coreutils:GPL-3.0-or-later

wc (short forwordcount) is a command inUnix,Plan 9,Inferno, andoperating systems that areUnix-like. The program reads eitherstandard input or a list ofcomputer files and generates one or more of the following statistics:newline count,word count, andbyte count. If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.

Sample execution ofwc:

$wcfoobar     40     149     947 foo   2294   16638   97724 bar   2334   16787   98671 total

The first column is the count of newlines, meaning that the text filefoo has 40 newlines whilebar has 2294 newlines- resulting in a total of 2334 newlines. The second column indicates the number of words in each text file showing that there are 149 words infoo and 16638 words inbar – giving a total of 16787 words. The last column indicates the number of characters in each text file, meaning that the filefoo has 947 characters whilebar has 97724 characters – 98671 characters all in all.

Newer versions ofwc can differentiate betweenbyte andcharacter count. This difference arises withUnicode which includes multi-byte characters. The desired behaviour is selected with the-c or-m options.

Through apipeline, it can also be used to preview the output size of a command with a potentially large output, without it printing the text into the console:

$grep-r"example"|wc    1071   23337  101349

wc is part of theX/Open Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version ofPOSIX.1 and theSingle Unix Specification.^[1] It appeared inVersion 1 Unix.^[2]

GNUwc used to be part of the GNUtextutils package; it is now part of GNUcoreutils. The version ofwc bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Rubin and David MacKenzie.^[3]

Awc command is also part ofASCII'sMSX-DOS2 Tools forMSX-DOS version 2.^[4]

The command is available as a separate package forMicrosoft Windows as part of theGnuWin32 project^[5] and theUnxUtils collection ofnativeWin32ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities.^[6]

Thewc command has also been ported to theIBM i operating system.^[7]

• wc -c <filename> prints the byte count
• wc -l <filename> prints the line count
• wc -m <filename> prints the character count
• wc -w <filename> prints the word count
• wc -L <filename> prints the length of the longest line (GNU extension)

• List of Unix commands

The WikibookGuide to Unix has a page on the topic of:Commands

• wc(1) - Original Unix First Edition manual page for wc.
• wc(1) – Linux User CommandsManual
• wc(1) – Plan 9 Programmer's Manual, Volume 1
• wc(1) – Inferno General commandsManual
• Thewc Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)

• Unix text processing utilities
• Unix SUS2008 utilities
• Plan 9 commands
• Inferno (operating system) commands
• IBM i Qshell commands

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata