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wc — Count lines, words, and bytes. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html

Submitted by: @import:tldr-pages·Mar 2, 2026·

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wccommandlinesandbytescliwordscount

Problem

How to use the wc command: Count lines, words, and bytes. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/wc-invocation.html>.

Solution

wc — Count lines, words, and bytes. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/wc-invocation.html>.

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}}

Code Snippets

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

Context

tldr-pages: common/wc

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