Counts characters inside a file in Linux bash.

Today we will look how to count number of characters in a file in bash shell on Linux.

We need to count number of characters sometimes when we associate C program with our shell script to create buffers/contants of particular size.

To get the number of characters in a file, we can use wc command with -c option.

1. Count number of characters in a file
We can get the output using “wc -c” command.

[root@nglinux]# wc -c file1
5781 file1.sh
[root@nglinux]# 

2. Default wc command output for single file
We should also know the default wc command output. Lets see the command output.

### We can see three numbers in output.
[root@nglinux ~]# wc file1.sh 
 212  828 5781 file1.sh
[root@nglinux ~]#

First three fields are as follows:
a. 212 : Are the newlines in the file.
b. 141 : Number of words in the file.
c. 5781 : Byte/character count for the file.

3. Default wc command output for multiple files
In case of multiple files, wc command also displays the total stats of each field.

[root@nglinux ~]# wc  file1.sh file2.sh 
 212  828 5781 file1.sh
 141  528 4197 file2.sh
 353 1356 9978 total
[root@nglinux ~]# 

Do post your comments or questions below.