wc — Count newlines, words, and bytes

Format

wc [–Blw] [–c|–m] [-W option[,option]...] [file …file …]

Description

wc tells you how large a text document is. It counts the number of newlines, words, characters, and bytes in text files. If you specify multiple files, wc produces counts for each file, plus totals for all files. If you do not specify any files, wc reads from the standard input (stdin).

Options

–B

Disables the automatic conversion of tagged files. This option is ignored if the filecodeset or pgmcodeset options (-W option) are specified.

–c

Prints a byte count. You cannot specify this option with –m.

–l

Prints a <newline> count

–m

Prints a character count. You cannot specify this option with –c.

–w

Prints a word count

-W option[,option]...

Specifies z/OS-specific options. The option keywords are case-sensitive. Possible options are:

filecodeset=codeset

Performs text conversion from one code set to another when reading from the file. The coded character set of the file is codeset. codeset can be a code set name known to the system or a numeric coded character set identifier (CCSID). Note that the command iconv -l lists existing CCSIDs along with their corresponding code set names. The filecodeset and pgmcodeset options can be used on files with any file tag.

If pgmcodeset is specified but filecodeset is omitted, then the default file code set is ISO8859-1 even if the file is tagged with a different code set. If neither filecodeset nor pgmcodeset is specified, text conversion will not occur unless automatic conversion is enabled or the _TEXT_CONV environment variable indicates text conversion. For more information about text conversion, see Controlling text conversion for z/OS UNIX shell commands.

If filecodeset or pgmcodeset is specified, then automatic conversion is disabled for this command invocation and the -B option is ignored if it is also specified. See z/OS UNIX System Services Planning for more information about automatic conversion.

When specifying values for filecodeset, use the values that Unicode Service supports. For more information about supported code sets, see z/OS Unicode Services User's Guide and Reference.

pgmcodeset=codeset

Performs text conversion from one code set to another when reading from the file. The coded character set of the program (command) is codeset. codeset can be a code set name known to the system or a numeric coded character set identifier (CCSID). Note that the command iconv -l lists existing CCSIDs along with their corresponding code set names. The filecodeset and pgmcodeset options can be used on files with any file tag.

If filecodeset is specified but pgmcodeset is omitted, then the default program code set is IBM-1047. If neither filecodeset nor pgmcodeset is specified, text conversion will not occur unless automatic conversion is enabled or the _TEXT_CONV environment variable indicates text conversion. For more information about text conversion, see Controlling text conversion for z/OS UNIX shell commands.

Restriction: The only supported values for pgmcodeset are IBM-1047 and 1047.

The order of options can dictate the order in which wc displays counts. For example, wc –cwl displays the number of bytes, then the number of words, then the number of <newline>s. If you do not specify any options, the default is wc –lwc (<newline> count, then words, then bytes).

A word is considered to be a character or characters delimited by white space.

Note: If you have a file containing double-byte characters, the byte count is higher than the character count.

Examples

To display the <newline> count, followed by the word count, followed by the byte count of a text file to the standard output (stdout):
```
wc myTextFile
```
To display a byte count followed by a word count of a text file containing ASCII characters to the standard output (stdout), assuming that:
- The text file is untagged and you do not want to tag it or enable automatic conversion, and
- You cannot alter the tag (for example, you are displaying an untagged public text file or a read-only text file):
```
wc -cw -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1,pgmcodeset=IBM-1047 myAsciiFile
```
To display the <newline> count of a text file containing EBCDIC characters, assuming that automatic conversion has been enabled but the text file is incorrectly tagged as UTF-8:
```
wc -lB myMisTaggedFile
```

Localization

wc uses the following localization environment variables:

LANG
LC_ALL
LC_CTYPE
LC_MESSAGES
NLSPATH

See Localization for more information.

Environment variables

wc uses the following environment variable:

_TEXT_CONV: Contains text conversion information for the command. The text conversion information is not used when either the -B option or the filecodeset or pgmcodeset option (-W option) is specified. For more information about text conversion, see Controlling text conversion for z/OS UNIX shell commands.

Exit values

0

Successful completion

1

Failure due to any of the following:

Inability to open the input file
The code set is not valid
Could not turn off automatic conversion
Could not perform requested text conversion

2

Failure because of an incorrect command-line option

Portability

POSIX.2, X/Open Portability Guide, UNIX systems.

The way the order of options –c, –l and –w affects the order of display is an extension to traditional implementations of wc. The -B and -W options are extensions of the POSIX standard.

Related information

awk, ed, vi