Editing Wc (Unix) (section)

==Example==
Sample execution of '''wc''':

<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
 $ wc foo bar
      40     149     947 foo
    2294   16638   97724 bar
    2334   16787   98671 total
</syntaxhighlight>

The first column is the count of newlines, meaning that the text file <code>foo</code> has 40 newlines while <code>bar</code> has 2294 newlines- resulting in a total of 2334 newlines. The second column indicates the number of words in each text file showing that there are 149 words in <code>foo</code> and 16638 words in <code>bar</code>{{snd}} giving a total of 16787 words. The last column indicates the number of characters in each text file, meaning that the file <code>foo</code> has 947 characters while <code>bar</code> has 97724 characters{{snd}} 98671 characters all in all.

Newer versions of <code>wc</code> can differentiate between [[byte]] and [[character (computing)|character]] count. This difference arises with [[Unicode]] which includes multi-byte characters. The desired behaviour is selected with the <code>-c</code> or <code>-m</code> options.

Through a [[Pipeline (Unix)|pipeline]], it can also be used to preview the output size of a command with a potentially large output, without it printing the text into the console:
<syntaxhighlight lang=console>
$ grep -r "example" |wc
    1071   23337  101349
</syntaxhighlight>