What Is the Word Count Command in Linux, Mac & Terminal?

• In Linux and Mac Terminal, the wc command is used to count the number of lines/words/bytes/characters inside a text file.
• If left to its default,wc file.txt will display the number of lines, words, and bytes in the file as well as the name of the file.
• To count words, use wc -w ; to count lines, use wc -l; to count characters, use wc -m ; and to count bytes, use wc -c .
• This is because the difference between wc -c and wc -m can differ as bytes and characters can be distinct in Unicode or non-English text.
• The number of lines of command output or lines that match a pattern could be counted using a pipe with wc, e.g. grep "error" app.log | wc -l.

The basic syntax is:

wc [option] [file]

Example:

wc file.txt

Output:

10  85  520 file.txt

By default, wc shows three values:

So, in this example:

10  85  520 file.txt

means the file has 10 lines, 85 words, and 520 bytes.

The easiest way that I know to remember the command is wc [option] [file] the option says what to count, the file name says where to count.

To count words in a file, use:

wc -w file.txt

Example:

wc -w article.txt

Output:

1250 article.txt

This means article.txt contains 1,250 words.

To count lines, use:

wc -l file.txt

Example:

wc -l app.log

This is useful for counting lines in log files, CSV files, code files, or text documents.

To count characters, use:

wc -m file.txt

Example:

wc -m content.txt

Use this when you want the actual character count of a text file.

To count bytes, use:

wc -c file.txt

Example:

wc -c data.txt

Bytes and characters are not always the same. In simple English texts, they are often equal. In Unicode text, one character may use more than one byte.

Example:

wc -c file.txt
wc -m file.txt

Use wc -m for character count and wc -c for byte count.

The wc command can also count output from another command.

Example:

echo "Linux terminal is useful" | wc -w

Output:

4

You can also count files in a directory:

ls | wc -l

This counts how many items are listed in the current directory.

You can combine grep with wc to count matching lines.

Example:

grep "error" app.log | wc -l

This counts how many lines contain the word error.

For case-insensitive search:

grep -i "error" app.log | wc -l

The wc command works almost the same on Linux and Mac Terminal.

For basic word, line, character, and byte counting, there is no major difference between Linux and Mac.

By default, wc shows the count and filename:

wc -w file.txt

Output:

500 file.txt

To show only the number, use input redirection:

wc -w < file.txt

Output:

500

This is useful in shell scripts.

For most users, wc -w file.txt is the main command for checking word count, while wc -l, wc -m, and wc -c are useful for line, character, and byte counts.

If you are comparing terminal counts with writing-app counts, you may also want the guides for checking word count on Mac and word count vs character count.