Counting Files and Their Contents with wcOne of Unix's handiest capabilities lets you count files and their contents. For example, you can count the number of files in a directory, or you can count the number of words or lines in a file. You do this counting with the wc command, as shown in Code Listing 6.1. Code Listing 6.1. Use wc -w to count the words in a file. The "honey-do" list in this example is quite a way from being the length of a novel.
Code Listing 6.2. With 85 separate items in the list, however, it's plenty long enough.
To count words using wc:
To count lines with wc:
Tips
|