| WC(1) | General Commands Manual | WC(1) | 
wc —
| wc | [ -c|-m]
      [-Llw] [file ...] | 
wc utility displays the number of lines, words,
  bytes and characters contained in each input file (or
  standard input, by default) to the standard output. A line is defined as a
  string of characters delimited by a <newline> character, and a word is
  defined as a string of characters delimited by white space characters. White
  space characters are the set of characters for which the
  iswspace(3) function returns
  true. If more than one input file is specified, a line of cumulative counts
  for all the files is displayed on a separate line after the output for the
  last file.
The following options are available:
-c-L-l-m-wWhen an option is specified, wc only
    reports the information requested by that option. The default action is
    equivalent to all the flags -clw having been
    specified.
The following operands are available:
If no file names are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is displayed.
By default, the standard output contains a line for each input file of the form:
lines words bytes file_name
wc utility exits 0 on success,
  and >0 if an error occurs.
wc utility was documented to define a
  word as a ``maximal string of characters delimited by ⟨space⟩,
  ⟨tab⟩ or ⟨newline⟩ characters''. The
  implementation, however, didn't handle non-printing characters correctly so
  that `` ^D^E '' counted as 6 spaces, while ``foo^D^Ebar'' counted as 8
  characters. 4BSD systems after
  4.3BSD modified the implementation to be consistent
  with the documentation. This implementation defines a ``word'' in terms of the
  iswspace(3) function, as
  required by IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”).
The -L option is a non-standard extension,
    compatible with the -L option of the GNU and
    FreeBSD wc utilities.
wc utility conforms to IEEE Std
  1003.2-1992 (“POSIX.2”).
wc utility appeared in
  Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
| September 1, 2019 | NetBSD 10.0 |