topic Basic Question on WC in Operating System - HP-UX

Basic Question on WC

uform — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:14:12 GMT

Re: Basic Question on WC

melvyn burnard — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:17:28 GMT

There is the additional carriage return character that gets counted as far as I recall

Re: Basic Question on WC

Peter Godron — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:18:56 GMT

Hi,
man wc
"A word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, or newlines."

It the newline char at the end:
echo hello | wc -l
1

Re: Basic Question on WC

James R. Ferguson — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:20:31 GMT

Hi:

The newline character is counted. You can see visually what Melvyn refers to by doing:

# echo hello|cat -etv

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Basic Question on WC

A. Clay Stephenson — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:27:56 GMT

Here is an alternative method:

expr length $(echo "hello")

Re: Basic Question on WC

Peter Nikitka — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:39:43 GMT

Hi,

if you just need the length of a string:

a=hello
print ${#a}

No additional newline needs to be considered.

mfG Peter

Re: Basic Question on WC

uform — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:44:46 GMT

ok thanks all.

Re: Basic Question on WC

Jonathan Fife — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:45:51 GMT

You could also put a \c at the end of the echo to supress the newline:

fifejj:/> echo "test\c" | wc -m
4
fifejj:/> echo "hello\c" | wc -m
5
fifejj:/> mystring=hello
fifejj:/> echo "${mystring}\c" | wc -m
5

Re: Basic Question on WC

Sandman! — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:50:43 GMT

wc is also counting the newline character written as \n...for example:

# echo hello | od -c
# echo test | od -c

cheers!

Re: Basic Question on WC

spex — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:53:04 GMT

# echo 'hello' | awk '{print length}'
5