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, by default) to the standard out-
     put.  A line is defined as a string of characters delimited by a  character, and a word is defined as a string of characters delim-
     ited by white space characters.  White space characters 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.

     -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 multi-
             byte characters, this is equivalent to 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 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.

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

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

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

SEE ALSO
     iswspace(3)

COMPATIBILITY
     Historically, the wc utility was documented to define a word as a ``maxi-
     mal string of characters delimited by ,  or  charac-
     ters''.  The implementation, however, didn't handle non-printing charac-
     ters correctly so that ``  ^D^E  '' counted as 6 spaces, while
     ``foo^D^Ebar'' counted as 8 characters.  4BSD systems after 4.3BSD modi-
     fied the implementation to be consistent with the documentation.  This
     implementation defines a ``word'' in terms of the iswspace(3) function,
     as required by IE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'').

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

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

BSD                              June 13, 2002                             BSD