How to Use the wc Command in Linux

What is wc

wc means "word count". It counts the lines, words and bytes in files or in piped text.

Syntax

wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Options

• -c, --bytes counts the bytes.
• -m, --chars counts the characters.
• -l, --lines counts the lines (new line characters).
• -w, --words counts the words.
• -L, --max-line-length prints the length of the longest line.
• --files0-from=F reads the file names from a file F, separated by NUL characters.
• --help shows the help page.
• --version shows the version.

Examples

1. Count a file

wc exampleFile.txt

The output shows three numbers and the file name: lines, words and bytes.

  12  86 540 exampleFile.txt

2. Count several files

wc exampleFile.txt employeeNames.txt

You get one line per file and a total line at the end.

3. Count the lines

wc -l exampleFile.txt

4. Count the words

wc -w exampleFile.txt

5. Count the characters and bytes

wc -m exampleFile.txt
wc -c exampleFile.txt

The numbers differ when the file has multi-byte characters (like accented letters).

Use wc with other commands

Count the files in a folder:

ls | wc -l

Count the logged-in users:

who | wc -l

Count how many times a word appears as a line in a log:

grep -c "error" app.log

Count the lines of all .py files:

cat *.py | wc -l

Find the longest line:

wc -L file.txt

Quick recap

• wc -l lines, wc -w words, wc -c bytes, wc -m characters.