How does word count work for newline (-l)? Number of newlines or lines

I wonder how does wc work? Most times it seems to return the number of lines, but sometimes it seems to be newlines? In the man page its newlines. But:

[jiewmeng@JM textFiles]$ echo -e "\n\n" | wc -
      3       0       3 -

If the above returns the number of newlines, it should just return 2? Also I got this wierd file:

[jiewmeng@JM textFiles]$ cat testA.txt 
The quick
brown fox
jumped over
the lazy 
dog.[jiewmeng@JM textFiles]$ wc testA.txt 
 4  9 50 testA.txt

In the above case, it appears to be returning the number of newlines?

Best Answer

In your first example echo will add it's newline at the end, you can stop this by adding the -n option to echo.

wc counts characters, words and lines, lines are defined as zero or more characters ending in line feed (\n).

Related Solutions

How to count the number of lines in a UTF-16LE/CR-LF/BOM file

Here's a perl script that opens files (given as command line arguments) in UTF-16 (endianness detected via BOM), and counts the lines.

#! /usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

while (my $file = shift @ARGV) {
    my $fh;
    if (!open($fh, '<:encoding(UTF-16)', $file)) {
        print STDERR "Failed to open [$file]: $!\n";
        next;
    }
    my $count = 0;
    $count++ while (<$fh>);
    print "$file: $count\n";
    close $fh;
}

(Dies if the BOM is not understood.)

Text Processing – How to Count Total Number of Words in a File

The command wc aka. word count can do it:

$ wc -w <file>

example

$ cat sample.txt
today is a 
good day


$ wc -w sample.txt
5 sample.txt


# just the number (thanks to Stephane Chazelas' comment)
$ wc -w < sample.txt
5

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to count the number of lines in a UTF-16LE/CR-LF/BOM file

Text Processing – How to Count Total Number of Words in a File

example

Related Question