WC(1P) POSIX Programmer's Manual WC(1P)
PROLOG
This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux
implementation of this interface may differ (consult the corresponding
Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface may
not be implemented on Linux.
NAME
wc -- word, line, and byte or character count
SYNOPSIS
wc [-c|-m] [-lw] [file...]
DESCRIPTION
The wc utility shall read one or more input files and, by default,
write the number of <newline> characters, words, and bytes contained in
each input file to the standard output.
The utility also shall write a total count for all named files, if more
than one input file is specified.
The wc utility shall consider a word to be a non-zero-length string of
characters delimited by white space.
OPTIONS
The wc utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of
POSIX.1-2008, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines.
The following options shall be supported:
-c Write to the standard output the number of bytes in each
input file.
-l Write to the standard output the number of <newline> charac-
ters in each input file.
-m Write to the standard output the number of characters in each
input file.
-w Write to the standard output the number of words in each
input file.
When any option is specified, wc shall report only the information
requested by the specified options.
OPERANDS
The following operand shall be supported:
file A pathname of an input file. If no file operands are speci-
fied, the standard input shall be used.
STDIN
The standard input shall be used if no file operands are specified, and
shall be used if a file operand is '-' and the implementation treats
the '-' as meaning standard input. Otherwise, the standard input shall
not be used. See the INPUT FILES section.
INPUT FILES
The input files may be of any type.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of wc:
LANG Provide a default value for the internationalization vari-
ables that are unset or null. (See the Base Definitions vol-
ume of POSIX.1-2008, Section 8.2, Internationalization Vari-
ables for the precedence of internationalization variables
used to determine the values of locale categories.)
LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of
all the other internationalization variables.
LC_CTYPE Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of
bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as
opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input
files) and which characters are defined as white-space char-
acters.
LC_MESSAGES
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format
and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error
and informative messages written to standard output.
NLSPATH Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing
of LC_MESSAGES.
ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS
Default.
STDOUT
By default, the standard output shall contain an entry for each input
file of the form:
"%d %d %d %s\n", <newlines>, <words>, <bytes>, <file>
If the -m option is specified, the number of characters shall replace
the <bytes> field in this format.
If any options are specified and the -l option is not specified, the
number of <newline> characters shall not be written.
If any options are specified and the -w option is not specified, the
number of words shall not be written.
If any options are specified and neither -c nor -m is specified, the
number of bytes or characters shall not be written.
If no input file operands are specified, no name shall be written and
no <blank> characters preceding the pathname shall be written.
If more than one input file operand is specified, an additional line
shall be written, of the same format as the other lines, except that
the word total (in the POSIX locale) shall be written instead of a
pathname and the total of each column shall be written as appropriate.
Such an additional line, if any, is written at the end of the output.
STDERR
The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.
OUTPUT FILES
None.
EXTENDED DESCRIPTION
None.
EXIT STATUS
The following exit values shall be returned:
0 Successful completion.
>0 An error occurred.
CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS
Default.
The following sections are informative.
APPLICATION USAGE
The -m option is not a switch, but an option at the same level as -c.
Thus, to produce the full default output with character counts instead
of bytes, the command required is:
wc -mlw
EXAMPLES
None.
RATIONALE
The output file format pseudo-printf() string differs from the System V
version of wc:
"%7d%7d%7d %s\n"
which produces possibly ambiguous and unparsable results for very large
files, as it assumes no number shall exceed six digits.
Some historical implementations use only <space>, <tab>, and <newline>
as word separators. The equivalent of the ISO C standard isspace()
function is more appropriate.
The -c option stands for ``character'' count, even though it counts
bytes. This stems from the sometimes erroneous historical view that
bytes and characters are the same size. Due to international require-
ments, the -m option (reminiscent of ``multi-byte'') was added to
obtain actual character counts.
Early proposals only specified the results when input files were text
files. The current specification more closely matches historical prac-
tice. (Bytes, words, and <newline> characters are counted separately
and the results are written when an end-of-file is detected.)
Historical implementations of the wc utility only accepted one argument
to specify the options -c, -l, and -w. Some of them also had multiple
occurrences of an option cause the corresponding count to be written
multiple times and had the order of specification of the options affect
the order of the fields on output, but did not document either of
these. Because common usage either specifies no options or only one
option, and because none of this was documented, the changes required
by this volume of POSIX.1-2008 should not break many historical appli-
cations (and do not break any historical conforming applications).
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
None.
SEE ALSO
cksum
The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1-2008, Chapter 8, Environment
Variables, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines
COPYRIGHT
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form
from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition, Standard for Information Technology
-- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base
Specifications Issue 7, Copyright (C) 2013 by the Institute of Electri-
cal and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. (This is
POSIX.1-2008 with the 2013 Technical Corrigendum 1 applied.) In the
event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and
The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard
is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online
at http://www.unix.org/online.html .
Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are
most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of the source
files to man page format. To report such errors, see https://www.ker-
nel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .
IEEE/The Open Group 2013 WC(1P)
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