Skip to main content

UNIX : wc command


The wc command is used unix to get the word command,number of lines , character count etc.

 syntax :

 > wc [options]

 The following are the option of a wc command



Options Description
-c print the byte count in input
-m print the character count in input
-l print the newline count in input
-L print the length of the longest line in input
-w print the word count in input


For example consider the input file sample.txt

>cat sample.txt
apple
orange
mango
kiwi
Cherry

Now lets look at the output if you give a wc command on it.

1. wc command

> wc sample.txt
5 5 31 sample.txt

 The output is printed like number of lines, words, and bytes in the file.


2.  wc command to find number of line in a file - this will count for number of \n characters in the file and give that as output.


 > wc -l sample.txt
5 sample.txt


 3. To find the number of file present in a directory the following combination of command can be used.

 Lets say the directory contain 2 files.
> ls
sample2.txt sample.txt

You need to list the files in a directory and give the wc command. The output will be 2 in this case.


> ls | wc -l
2




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel : How to pad zeros

Today I got a requirement to format the number in excel cell - to left pad number with zeros.i find the following function very useful to do it. In case one to make the number left padded with "0" s give the formula =TEXT(A1,"0000") In case two even more enhanced form to make it left padded with "0" and add two decimal places give the formula as =TEXT(A2,"0000.00")
Post a Comment
Read more

Mount an iso image in ubuntu using no GUI

We can easily mount an iso image file in our system to a directory in linux.We need not require an GUI application to do this.It is easy to do from the terminal itself. We use the mount command for that. The steps are as follows  1. Open the terminal in ubuntu (Shortcut press ctrl+Alt+t) 2. Create a directory to mount the iso image              $sudo mkdir /media/myimage 3. Then type the following command     $sudo modprobe loop 4.After that go to the location of the iso image file and type     $sudo mount /media/myimage -t iso9660 -0 loop     The iso file is mounted to the specified directory To unmount it give the command   sudo unmount /media/myimage That all.Cool isn't! sudo modprobe loop will loads the module for loopback file system iso9660 is the file system used by CD-ROM -t specify the file system type -o loop additional option used by a loopback filesystem
Post a Comment
Read more

UNIX : How to ignore lines with certain names

Sometimes we need to ignore multiple lines with certain words and get the list out of the file. usually it will be a log file to read . The below grep command can be used to ignore multiple words present in a text file. Lets say the file contain $ cat list.txt apple orange apple banana papaya Now we need to ignore line with orange , banana and papaya . So we can use the below grep command. $ cat list.txt | grep -Ev "orange|banana|papaya" apple apple It will ignore lines with the words in -v part of grep.
Post a Comment
Read more