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wc (short for word count) is a command in Unix-like operating systems.The program takes as its argument either standard input or a list of files. One or more of the following statistics are generated: number of bytes, number of words, and number of lines (specifically, the number of newline characters). If a list of files is provided, both individual and total statistics follow.
The following is a sample execution of wc.
$ wc ideas.txt excerpt.txt
40 149 947 ideas.txt
2294 16638 97724 excerpt.txt
2334 16787 98671 total
Newer versions of wc differentiate between byte and character count. This makes a difference with the advent of Unicode, which includes multi-byte characters.
GNU wc is part of the GNU textutils package.
