15. wc and nl

Lesson Content

The wc (word count) command shows the total count of words in a file.

$ wc /etc/passwd
 96     265    5925 /etc/passwd

It display the number of lines, number of words and number of bytes, respectively.

To just see just the count of a certain field, use the -l, -w, or -c respectively.

$ wc -l /etc/passwd
96

Another command you can use to check the count of lines on a file is the nl (number lines) command.

file1.txt
i
like
turtles

$ nl file1.txt
1. i
2. like
3. turtles

Exercise

How would you get the total count of lines by using the nl file without searching through the entire output? Hint: Use some of the other commands you learned in this course.

Quiz Question

# What command would you use to get the total number of words in a file and just the words? > nl command is a Unix/Linux utility that is used for numbering lines, accepting input either from a file or from STDIN. It copies each specified file to STDOUT, with line numbers appended before the lines. 1. [ ] wc -c 2. [ ] wc -l 3. [ ] wc 4. [x] wc -w