The wc (word count) command counts lines, words, and bytes of its input. The default output is to show all three:
$ wc .bashrc 101 550 3391 .bashrc
In this example, our .bashrc file has 101 lines, 550 space-delimited words, and 3,391 bytes. You can print only one of these numbers with the -l, -w, and -c options, respectively.
Technically, wc -l counts the number of newlines in the file, not the number of lines that they delimit. This is almost the same thing, but not exactly.
If you provide more than one file for wc to examine, it will also print a total:
$ wc -c .bashrc .bash_profile 3391 .bashrc 471 .bash_profile 3862 total
Be careful to distinguish between bytes and characters. If you actually need to count the number of ...
