23: Counting characters, words and lines in a file

  Wurm lab

learner@:learning_unix$ ls
opening_lines.txt

learner@:learning_unix$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 learner learner 42 Dec  2 09:09 opening_lines.txt

learner@:learning_unix$ wc opening_lines.txt
2  7 42 opening_lines.txt

learner@:learning_unix$ wc -l opening_lines.txt
2 opening_lines.txt

The ls -l option shows us a long listing, which includes the size of the file in bytes (in this case ‘42’). Another way of finding this out is by using Unix’s wc command (word count). By default this tells you many lines, words, and characters are in a specified file (or files), but you can use command-line options to give you just one of those statistics (in this case we count lines with wc -l).