wc.md

wc

Word Count -> count lines, words or letters in a file.

Basic Usage

count the lines in a file

wc -l lines.txt

or to show only the number of lines you can run:

cat lines.txt | wc -l

count the words in a file

wc -w words.txt

count the characters in a file

wc -m file.txt

To count files and directories showed by ls:

ls -l | wc -l

Interview questions:

Question: How do you count how many lines a file has in Linux?

Answer: You run the command wc -l and give it a file to count the number of lines.