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WC(1)                     BSD General Commands Manual                    WC(1)

NAME
     wc -- word, line, character, and byte count

SYNOPSIS
     wc [-clmw] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The wc utility displays the number of lines, words, and bytes contained in each input file, or standard
     input (if no file is specified) to the standard output.  A line is defined as a string of characters
     delimited by a <newline> character.  Characters beyond the final <newline> character will not be
     included in the line count.

     A word is defined as a string of characters delimited by white space characters.  White space charac-ters characters
     ters are the set of characters for which the iswspace(3) function returns true.  If more than one input
     file is specified, a line of cumulative counts for all the files is displayed on a separate line after
     the output for the last file.

     The following options are available:

     -c      The number of bytes in each input file is written to the standard output.  This will cancel out
             any prior usage of the -m option.

     -l      The number of lines in each input file is written to the standard output.

     -m      The number of characters in each input file is written to the standard output.  If the current
             locale does not support multibyte characters, this is equivalent to the -c option.  This will
             cancel out any prior usage of the -c option.

     -w      The number of words in each input file is written to the standard output.

     When an option is specified, wc only reports the information requested by that option.  The order of
     output always takes the form of line, word, byte, and file name.  The default action is equivalent to
     specifying the -c, -l and -w options.

     If no files are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is displayed.  The prompt will
     accept input until receiving EOF, or [^D] in most environments.

ENVIRONMENT
     The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of wc as described in
     environ(7).

EXIT STATUS
     The wc utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES
     Count the number of characters, words and lines in each of the files report1 and report2 as well as the
     totals for both:

           wc -mlw report1 report2

COMPATIBILITY
     Historically, the wc utility was documented to define a word as a ``maximal string of characters delim-ited delimited
     ited by <space>, <tab> or <newline> characters''.  The implementation, however, did not handle non-printing nonprinting
     printing characters correctly so that ``  ^D^E  '' counted as 6 spaces, while ``foo^D^Ebar'' counted as
     8 characters.  4BSD systems after 4.3BSD modified the implementation to be consistent with the documen-tation. documentation.
     tation.  This implementation defines a ``word'' in terms of the iswspace(3) function, as required by
     IEEE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'').

SEE ALSO
     iswspace(3)

STANDARDS
     The wc utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

HISTORY
     A wc command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.

BSD                            February 23, 2005                           BSD