WC(1)                   FreeBSD General Commands Manual                  WC(1)

NAME

     wc - word, line, character, and byte count

SYNOPSIS

     wc [--libxo] [-c | -m] [-Llw] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The wc utility displays the number of lines, words, and bytes contained
     in each input file, or standard input (if no file is specified) to the
     standard output.  A line is defined as a string of characters delimited
     by a "newline" character.  Characters beyond the final "newline"
     character will not be included in the line count.

     A word is defined as a string of characters delimited 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:

     --libxo  Generate output via libxo(3) in a selection of different human
              and machine readable formats.  See xo_options(7) for details on
              command line arguments.

     -L       Write the length of the line containing the most bytes (default)
              or characters (when -m is provided) to standard output.  When
              more than one file argument is specified, the longest input line
              of all files is reported as the value of the final "total".

     -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.

     When an option is specified, wc only reports the information requested by
     that option.  The order of output always takes the form of line, word,
     byte, and file name.  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.  The prompt will accept input until receiving EOF, or [^D] in
     most environments.

     If wc receives a SIGINFO (see the status argument for stty(1)) signal,
     the interim data will be written to the standard error output in the same
     format as the standard completion message.

ENVIRONMENT

     The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution
     of wc as described in environ(7).

EXIT STATUS

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

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

     Find the longest line in a list of files:

           wc -L file1 file2 file3 | fgrep total

COMPATIBILITY

     Historically, the wc utility was documented to define a word as a
     "maximal string of characters delimited by <space>, <tab> or <newline>
     characters".  The implementation, however, did not handle non-printing
     characters correctly so that "  ^D^E  " counted as 6 spaces, while
     "foo^D^Ebar" counted as 8 characters.  4BSD systems after 4.3BSD modified
     the implementation to be consistent with the documentation.  This
     implementation defines a "word" in terms of the iswspace(3) function, as
     required by IEEE Std 1003.2 ("POSIX.2").

     The -L option is a non-standard FreeBSD extension, compatible with the -L
     option of the GNU wc utility.

SEE ALSO

     iswspace(3), libxo(3), xo_options(7)

STANDARDS

     The wc utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 ("POSIX.1").

HISTORY

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

FreeBSD 15.1-STABLE-HBSD         July 16, 2025                           WC(1)