wc

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wc

wc counts lines (-l), words (-w), and characters/bytes (-c) in its input. It's often placed at the end of a pipeline to summarize how much data made it through previous filtering steps. Running it with no flags prints all three counts together.

Note: command | wc -l is the standard idiom for counting how many lines a command produced.

Example: wc

bash

#!/bin/bash
printf "one\ntwo\nthree\n" > words.txt

echo "Lines: $(wc -l < words.txt)"
echo "Words: $(wc -w < words.txt)"
echo "Characters: $(wc -c < words.txt)"

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Running Commands in the Background (&) and $!
grep
The wait Command
Process IDs and the ps Command
cut
Signals and trap
sort
Subshells vs the Current Shell ( ( ) vs { } )
uniq
Command Substitution vs Process Substitution
wc
Killing Processes

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wc

wc

Chapter Quiz — Complete all 12 topics to unlock

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