Unix: Visual QuickStart Guide

Counting files and their contents with wc

One of UNIX's handiest capabilities lets you count files and their contents. For example, you can count the number of files in a directory, or you can count the number of words or lines in a file. You do this counting with the wc command, as shown in Code Listing 6.1.

To count words using wc:

• wc -w honeydo

  At the shell prompt, type wc -w (for words) and the name of the file you want to count the words in. wc will oblige, as shown in Code Listing 6.1.

To count lines with wc:

• wc -l honeydo

  Use wc -l followed by the file name to count the lines in the file (Code Listing 6.2). This is useful for poetry or for things like lists (e.g., our "honey-do" list always has a minimum of 73 items on it).

Tip

You can ...