What command is used to count the total number of lines, words, and characters contained in a file on LINUX?
LINUX में किसी फ़ाइल में टोटल लाइन्स,वर्ड्स और कैरक्टर्स को काउंट करने के लिए कौन से कमांड का यूज़ किया जाता है?
Topic : Introduction to Operating SystemA. countw
B. wcount
C. wc
D. count p
Correct Answer
C. wc
Explanation :
The most easiest way to count the number of lines, words, and characters in text file is to use the Linux command “wc” in terminal. The command “wc” basically means “word count” and with different optional parameters one can use it to count the number of lines, words, and characters in a text file.
In Unix, to get the line, word, or character count of a document, use the wc command. At the Unix shell prompt, enter:
wc filenameReplace filename with the file or files for which you want information. For each file, wc will output three numbers. The first is the line count, the second is the word count, and the third is the character count. For example, if you entered wc .login, the output would be something similar to the following:
38 135 847 .loginTo narrow the focus of your query, use one or more of the following wc options:
| -c | bytes |
| -l | lines |
| -m | characters |
| -w | words |
Note:
In some versions of wc, the -m option will not be available or -c will report characters. However, in most cases, the values for -c and -m are equal.
For example, to find out how many bytes are in the .login file, you could enter:
wc -c .loginYou may also pipe standard output into wc to determine the size of a stream. For example, to find out how many files are in a directory, enter:
/bin/ls -l | wc -lFor more information about wc, read its man page. To do this, at the Unix prompt, enter:
man wcRelated documents
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Last modified on 2019-06-18 14:43:49.
You are here: Home / Linux Tips / Count Files / How to Count the Number of lines, Words, and, Characters in a Text File from Terminal?
How can we get the number of lines or number of words in a file? The most easiest way to count the number of lines, words, and characters in text file is to use the Linux command “wc” in terminal.
The command “wc” basically means “word count” and with different optional parameters one can use it to count the number of lines, words, and characters in a text file.
To count the number of lines, use “wc” with “l” as
wc -l yourTextFileTo count the number of words, use “wc” with “w” option as
wc -w yourTextFileAnd to count the total number of characters, use “wc” with “c” as
wc -m yourTextFileUsing wc with no options will get you the counts of bytes, lines, and words (-c, -l and -w option).
>wc file1.txt 1065 5343 40559 file1.txtCount words, characters, and lines in multiple files
wc command can take multiple files at the same time and give you the number of words, characters, and lines. To get counts from multiple files, you simply name the files with space between them. Also it will get you the total counts. For example, to count the number of characters (-m), words (w) and lines (-l) in each of the files file1.txt and file2.txt and the totals for both, we would simply use
>wc -mlw file1.txt file2.txtWe would get the results in a nice tabular form
1065 5343 40454 file1.txt 296 1075 11745 file2.txt 1361 6418 52199 totalHow to Count a Certain Type of Files in a Directory?
One can also cleverly use the “wc” command on terminal and find the number of files (or files of certain type) in a directory. For example, to find the number of pdf files in a directory
ls -l *.pdf | wc -lAnd remember that the first line of “ls -l” statement is a description. Therefore, the total number of pdf files is one less than the result of “ls -l *.pdf | wc -l“.
We just saw an example of using pipe operator “|” to count files. Here we fed the output of command “ls -l *.pdf” to “wc”. Or ability to piping (or chaining) multiple commands is a hallmark of Linux. We can do the same to numerous scenarios. For example, if we want to count all users who have currently logged on, we can do
who | wc -lHow to get the number of lines matching a pattern in a file?
If you want to count the number of lines matching a string pattern in a text file, the “grep” command with the option “-c’ comes in really handy.
less my_text_file.txt | grep -c "pattern"or we can directly apply “grep” on the file like
grep -c "pattern" my_text_file.txt