Counting Lines

Word Count

wc (word count) counts lines, words, and characters in a file or stdin.

Basic Usage

wc notes.txt

Output:

3 6 34 notes.txt

The three numbers are: lines, words, characters (bytes).

Counting Only Lines

The -l flag counts only lines:

wc -l notes.txt

Output:

3 notes.txt

The number is the count of newline characters. A standard text file with 3 lines has 3 newlines.

Other Flags

With Pipes

wc is very useful at the end of a pipeline:

grep "Linux" notes.txt | wc -l

Output:

1

This counts how many lines matched the pattern.

ls | wc -l

Counts the number of items in the current directory.

Your Task

Count the number of lines in notes.txt using wc -l.