NAME
wc
- word, line, and byte count
SYNOPSIS
wc
[-c | -m]
[-Llw]
[file ...]
DESCRIPTION
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
-
The number of bytes in each input file
is written to the standard output.
- -L
-
The number of characters in the longest line of each input file
is written to the standard output.
- -l
-
The number of lines in each input file
is written to the standard output.
- -m
-
The number of characters in each input file
is written to the standard output.
- -w
-
The number of words in each input file
is written to the standard output.
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:
- file
-
A pathname of an input file.
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
EXIT STATUS
SEE ALSO
iswspace(3)
COMPATIBILITY
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.
STANDARDS
The
wc
utility conforms to
IEEE Std 1003.2-1992 (``POSIX.2'') .