Just now, I wanted to see how many blogs I’ve written so far. So instead of manually counting them in the posts directory, I went to that directory and used the wc word count command after Googling it.

As you can see, I used the wc command and passed it the -l flag to count the number of lines. The output of ls is piped into wc -l, which then counts and displays the number of lines. Some other useful use-cases include:

Counting Words in stdout#

If you want to count the number of words in the stdout, you can use wc with the -w.

your_command | wc -w

Counting Characters in stdout#

If you need to count all characters, use wc with the -c option.

your_command | wc -c