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Article Index
1. Name
2. Synopsis
3. Frequently used options
4. Examples

1. Name

wc [man page] - print newline, word, and byte counts for each file

2. Synopsis

wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...
wc [OPTION]... --files0-from=F

3. Frequently used options

-c, --bytes      print the byte counts
-m, --chars      print the character counts
-l, --lines      print the newline counts
-w, --words      print the word counts

4. Examples

By default if you pass file as a argument to wc command it prints number of lines, words and characters:

wc /etc/passwd

To instruct wc command to print only number of words contained within file we can use -w option:

wc -w /etc/passwd

Similarly if we need only number of lines we would use -l option:

wc -l /etc/passwd

For number of characters we need to use -c option:

wc -m /etc/passwd

wc can also print out a number of bytes within file:

wc -c /etc/passwd