WordCount

per man wc,

wc – word, line, character, and byte count

# ...more...
 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.

In action

Take an example text file, here testfile.txt:

this is one line.  
This is another line.
This is the third line.

wc testfile.txt
       2      13      65 testfile.txt

# words
wc -w testfile.txt
      13 testfile.txt

# bytes
wc -m testfile.txt 
      65 testfile.txt

# lines
# HM?!
wc -l testfile.txt 
      2 testfile.txt

Piping

# note: npm outdated includes a "header", so the number may be 1 greater than the total number of outdated modules
npm outdated | wc -l
      34

Tags:

linux

bash

cli

commands