If you’re interested in finding the word count or lines of a file in your Linux environment you can use the wc command. This is a handy command especially for monitoring extremely large files or system logs. In this article, we will show you the basic usage of the Linux wc command.
Basic Linux wc command usage
This will provide an output of 11 22 33 file.txt where
11 – Amount of lines
22 – Amount of words
33 – Amount of characters
wc file.txt
Find the number of lines or words of a file
If you wish to find out separate information, like just the lines or words you can use
wc -l file.txt # lines wc -w file.txt # words wc -m file.txt # characters
