FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Text-Related Commands

One of the original design goals of UNIX at AT&T was the easy processing of text data. UNIX and FreeBSD include a large number of commands for processing text data from the command line. This chapter doesn’t cover every available text command, but you’ll learn how to use the most useful ones. With a few judiciously applied commands invoking small but flexible command-line text-processing utilities, you can take a bare text file and extract information from it like a sorcerer.

Counting Lines, Words, and Characters

Use the wc command to count the number of lines, words, and characters in a text file. With no options, this command gives all three. For example, the following tells me that there are 1,160 lines, 7,823 words, ...