How to Count Lines, Words, and Characters in Linux (wc)

wc (word count) counts the number of lines, words, and characters (or bytes) in a file or piped input.

Key points

• wc -l counts only lines — one of the most common uses, e.g. counting how many results a command produced
• wc -w counts words; wc -c counts bytes
• Commonly combined with a pipe: grep -c isn't always available, so cat file | grep pattern | wc -l is a common substitute

Example

cat access.log | wc -l