When you are writing a paper for publication there is often a limit or a requirement on the number of words or the number of characters.
The wc command is a quick and easy way to get those kinds of stats on a file, or a set of files. It gives you the number of lines, the number of words, and the number of characters.
For example, if you have written a file "report" and type in "wc report" at the command line, it will give you three numbers, the first one being the number of lines in the file "report", the second one the number words, and the last one the number of characters. The nice thing about the wc command is that it is actually easy to remember: wc stands for "word count".
Command line word count???
Sounds antiquated. Any desent wordprocessor does that with a click (or three). And it counts the words, not the “garbage” characters.
But hey, sometimes I jot things down in Leafpad and maybe I need to count the words then.
/Tommy
It’s useful when used in scripts… or when say, for example, you want to count number of specific processes with running:
$ps -aelf | grep | wc -l
The above command will count and shows the number of lines, i.e. number of processes running with . Useful in scripts.