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wc – Print Line, Word, And Byte Counts
The wc (word count) command is used to display the number of lines, words, and bytes contained in files. For example:
[me@linuxbox ~]$ wc ls-output.txt
7902 64566 503634 ls-output.txt
[me@linuxbox ~]$ wc ls-output.txt
7902 64566 503634 ls-output.txt
In this case it prints out three numbers: lines, words, and bytes contained in ls-out- put.txt. Like our previous commands, if executed without command line arguments, wc accepts standard input. The “-l” option limits its output to only report lines. Adding it to a pipeline is a handy way to count things. To see the number of items we have in our sorted list, we can do this:
[me@linuxbox ~]$ ls /bin /usr/bin | sort | uniq | wc -l
2728
[me@linuxbox ~]$ ls /bin /usr/bin | sort | uniq | wc -l
2728