WC(1)

✨ WC(1) — the count-everything bestie of the manual pages ✨

okay so, <rainbow>wc</rainbow> — short for word count, but honestly? she does so much more than words. Manual section 1, General Commands Manual, and she's literally the moment. 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

wc — print newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE, plus a total line if you hand her more than one FILE. (Yes bestie, she keeps score. Obsessed. 🎀)

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

Print newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE, and a total line if more than one FILE is specified. That's it, that's the whole vibe. Give her files, she gives you numbers. Give her a whole bunch of files and she'll add up a total at the end like the responsible main character she is. 👑

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -c, --bytes — print the byte counts 🫶
• -m, --chars — print the character counts
• --files0-from F — read input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in file F. if F is - then read the names from standard input 🌈
• -l, --lines — print the newline counts
• -L, --max-line-length — print the length of the longest line
• --total WHEN — when to print a line with total counts. WHEN can be: auto, always, only, never
• -w, --words — print the word counts 🍓
• -h, --help — print help
• -V, --version — print version
• [files] — the files, bestie

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💜 VERSION 💜

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

Count all lines in a file:

wc [-l|--lines] path/to/file

Count all words in a file:

wc [-w|--words] path/to/file

Count all bytes in a file:

wc [-c|--bytes] path/to/file

Count all characters in a file (taking multi-byte characters into account):

wc [-m|--chars] path/to/file

Count all lines, words, and bytes from stdin:

find . | wc

Count the length of the longest line in number of characters:

wc [-L|--max-line-length] path/to/file

These examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. heads up though: as uutils is a work in progress, some of these examples might fail. 😭 not a vibe, but we're being honest about it.

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this one's from uutils coreutils, version 0.12.0, dated 2026-09-25 — go count something and slay. 🧚⭐👑