Issue with wc -c and wc -m

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All,

I have a small queries to get the character count

i tried with wc -c and wc -m but its not returend current result

For eg:

wc -c
wc -m

echo "Name" | wc -c

result: 5 but actually it should returned 4
Help me on this to ge the correct one.

Thanks!

---------- Post updated at 09:22 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:12 AM ----------

wc -c

2

echo adds a newline char

echo "Name" | od -bc
0000000 116 141 155 145 012
          N   a   m   e  \n

Five then

3

Hi Aia,

I want to get the word count without new line character "\n"
for eg

echo "Name"
It should retruned 4 instead of 5

4

If your version of echo supports it you might try with the -n flag to suppress that newline.

echo -n "Name" | wc -c

Otherwise use printf

printf "Name" | wc -c
5

Just subtract wc -l from the value returned:

$ printf "one\ntwo\nthree\four\n" | wc -c
18
$ printf "one\ntwo\nthree\four\n" | wc -l
3

So your count is 15 (18 - 3)

or delete the newline chars:

$ printf "one\ntwo\nthree\four\n" | tr -d '\n' | wc -c
15