Type. Command. wc (short for word count) is a command in Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems. The program reads either standard input or a list of computer files and generates one or more of the following statistics: newline count, word count, and byte count.

What is the use of wc in Linux?

wc command in Linux with examples. wc stands for word count. As the name implies, it is mainly used for counting purpose. It is used to find out number of lines, word count, byte and characters count in the files specified in the file arguments.

What does wc return in Linux?

The wc command in UNIX is a command line utility for printing newline, word and byte counts for files. It can return the number of lines in a file, the number of characters in a file and the number of words in a file. It can also be combine with pipes for general counting operations.