How to count number of words and rows in Linux files

Linux wc is a simple command that enables you to find out how many words and rows does a text file or output contain.

As already mentioned we will use a wc command.

As an example let's take a file names text.txt which contains text you can see on the image.

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  Linux Terminal basics

Usage of the command is pretty straight forward.

wc file_name

In our case:
wc text.txt

We get three numbers as a result
First number is the number of rows, second number represent the number of words and the third number of characters.

The wc command can also be applied with all other programs or commands that give an output as a result.

In this case we only need to add | wc

Let's take the folder listing ls -al as an example:

ls -al | wc