Interview › Scripting (Bash, Groovy)
How do you count lines, words, and characters with wc? [Advanced]
Answer
wc counts lines, words, bytes, and characters. wc -l counts lines, wc -w counts words, wc -c counts bytes, and wc -m counts characters.
Technical explanation
wc is commonly used in scripts to validate row counts, estimate file size, and monitor log volume.
For exact line count of a file, use wc -l < file to avoid printing the filename.
Bytes and characters can differ with multibyte encodings such as UTF-8.
Hands-on example
lines=$(wc -l < access.log)words=$(wc -w < notes.txt)bytes=$(wc -c < artifact.tar.gz)echo "lines=$lines words=$words bytes=$bytes"
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