Go Systems Programming

Developing wc(1) in Go

The principal idea behind the code of the wc.go program is that you can read a text file line by line until there is nothing left to read. For each line you read, you find out the number of characters and the number of words it has. As you need to read your input line by line, the use of bufio is preferred instead of the plain io because it simplifies the code. However, trying to implement wc.go on your own using io would be a very educational exercise.

But first, you will see that the wc(1) utility generates the following output:

$ wc wc.go cp.go
      68     160    1231 wc.go
      45     112     755 cp.go
     113     272    1986 total

So, if wc(1) has to process more than one file, it automatically generates summary information.

In Chapter 9, Goroutines ...