How to display the number of lines, words and characters in separate lines

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

This can be done in a very simple shell script:

for file in *; do echo -n "$file" | wc -m; done

Just loop through each file echoing the name to wc. The -n on the echo is so that it doesn't append a newline, which would erroneously increase the count by 1.