wc Command Cheat Sheet

wc (word count) prints newline, word, and byte counts for each file.

Synopsis

wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Basic Usage

wc file.txt
# Output:  10  50  300 file.txt
#        Lines Words Bytes

Specific Counts

Count Lines (-l)

Most common usage.

wc -l file.txt

Count Words (-w)

wc -w file.txt

Count Characters (-m)

Multibyte-safe character count.

wc -m file.txt

Count Bytes (-c)

wc -c file.txt

Max Line Length (-L)

Print length of the longest line.

wc -L file.txt

Piping Usage

Count Files in Directory

ls -1 | wc -l

Count Processes

ps aux | wc -l

Count Filtered Results

grep "Error" logfile.log | wc -l

Notes

• Argument vs Pipe:

  wc -l file.txt   # Output: 10 file.txt
  cat file.txt | wc -l  # Output: 10 (No filename)
  

  Useful if you want just the number for a variable.