Master the Linux ‘wc’ Command: Count Lines, Words, Bytes, and Characters

wc command syntax

The wc (word count) utility in Unix/Linux reports the number of lines, words, bytes, and characters in one or more files.

# wc [options] filename

Common options

wc -l

– prints the line count of each file. wc -w – prints the word count of each file. wc -c – prints the byte count of each file. wc -m – prints the character count of each file. wc -L – prints the length of the longest line (in characters).

Example file

Assume a file named devops.txt containing a list of Linux distributions:

$ cat devops.txt

Red Hat
CentOS
AlmaLinux
Rocky Linux
Fedora
Debian
Scientific Linux
OpenSuse
Ubuntu
Xubuntu
Linux Mint
Deepin Linux
Slackware
Mandriva

1. Basic usage (no options)

Running wc devops.txt returns three numbers: lines, words, and bytes.

$ wc devops.txt

12  16 112 devops.txt

2. Count lines

Use -l to display only the line count.

$ wc -l devops.txt

12 devops.txt

3. Count words

Use -w to display only the word count.

$ wc -w devops.txt

16 devops.txt

4. Count characters

Use -m to display the total number of characters.

$ wc -m devops.txt

112 devops.txt

5. Count bytes

Use -c to display the total number of bytes (identical to characters for plain ASCII text).

$ wc -c devops.txt

112 devops.txt

6. Longest line length

Use -L to show the length of the longest line in characters. In the example file, the longest line is "Scientific Linux" (16 characters).

$ wc -L devops.txt

16 devops.txt