Counting Words ( the "wc" command )

COUNTING WORDS ( The "wc" command )

There are people that love to count beans, myself at the end of the day I love to count the words I have written. <g>
And sure, Linux has just the command for that: "wc"

The "wc" command comes with a few options:

QUOTE

-c, print the byte counts
-m, print the character counts
-l, print the new line counts
-L, print the length of the longest line
-w, print the word counts

When I execute the command on this little bit of text I am typing right now I get:

Words:

CODE

$ wc -w test.txt
184 Desktop/text.txt

Lines:

CODE

$ wc -l test.txt
50 Desktop/text.txt

Characters:

CODE

$ wc -m test.txt
1045 Desktop/text.txt

Longest line:

CODE

$ wc -L test.txt
118 Desktop/text.txt

Sure you can feed the "wc" command more then one file in a different format at once:

CODE

$ wc -w test.txt xgl.doc NewTips.txt post.kwd
184 test.txt
280 xgl.doc
209 NewTips.txt
1161 post.kwd
1834 total

And here is one to try at home . . . . cd to your Documents folder and do "wc -w *.odt" ( or "wc -w *.doc" if that is your preferred format )

Isn't that fun . . . . . . at least you get the impression you weren't all that lazy after all . . . .

Bruno

-- Oct 1 2006 --