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word count

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September 17th, 2006 mysurface Posted in Common, cat, echo, wc | Hits: 7183 |

Word count is a very common tools that used to calculate number of lines, words and characters. For example if I can do this

echo "hello world." | wc
1       2      13

The result indicate that there are 1 line, 2 words and 13 characters.

You can output result separately, -c indicates characters, -w indicate words, -l indicate lines.

echo "hello world." | wc -c

You can count for any file even binaries by using -c

cat hello.c | wc -c

Try to check with ls -l hello.c, you will discover that, the characters count is actualy same as the bytes of the files.

Therefore,

cat `which cat` | wc -c

is actually returns file size of cat binaries in terms of number of bytes.

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One Response to “word count”

  1. Light Star Says:
    September 23rd, 2006 at 11:31 am

    Another good use of wc is to see the number of files of a specific type available in a directory.

    ls *. | wc -l

    Another use is to find files of a specific type in an entire folder (including its sub-dirs)

    find ./ -name “*.” | wc -l

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