wc

wc prints newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE.

$ wc tecmint.txt
12  16 112 tecmint.txt

Useful Options / Examples

wc -l

To count number of newlines in a file use the option -l, which prints the number of lines from a given file.

$ wc -l tecmint.txt
12 tecmint.txt

wc -w

Using -w argument with wc command prints the number of words in a file.

$ wc -w tecmint.txt
16 tecmint.txt

wc -c

Using -c with wc command will print the total number of bytes in a file.

$ wc -c tecmint.txt
112 tecmint.txt

wc -m

Using -m with wc command will print the total number of characters in a file.

$ wc -m tecmint.txt
112 tecmint.txt

wc -L

The ‘wc‘ command allow an argument ‘-L‘, it can be used to print out the length of longest (number of characters) line in a file.

$ wc -L tecmint.txt
16 tecmint.txt