shell – Run wc and display only the word count

shellwc

I have been trying to create a file called ~/dictwords.txt, which contains the number of words found in the file /usr/share/dict/words.

I already created the file then I removed it because I did it wrong I originally did the echo command. Then I tried this command and was so excited because I thought I was correct.

wc -w /usr/share/dict/words > ~/dictwords.txt

It's still wrong, I am supposed to have just the number, without a file name.

Best Answer

By default, wc print result along with filenames. If you want only the result, you must make wc read input from stdin:

</usr/share/dict/words wc -w > ~/dicwords.txt

With your current solution, you can use some other tools to get only the result from wc, like cut, awk, grep...

wc -c /usr/share/dict/words | cut -d' ' -f1 > ~/dicwords.txt

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Shell – List files in a directory with a certain extension

Do you mean list all files that start with lib and end with .a in /usr/lib, then print the wordcount with wc to usrlibs.txt?

ls -l /usr/lib/lib*.a | wc -w > ~/usrlibs.txt

should work. You just forgot to add a wildcard between your patterns.

Best Answer

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Shell – List files in a directory with a certain extension

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