wordcount (wc)

[Almer S. Tigelaar]

Hello,

I have been using the 'wc' program (version 5.97) to manually verify
some counts outputted by a component part of an application I am
developing.

I noticed that:
        echo "12345" | wc -m
Gives me '6' as output. But I don't entirely understand why.

On multi-line input 'wc' seems to add '1' to the character count in each
sentence. One would say then that this '1' is caused by counting
'invisible' newline characters, but there is no newline in the example
above.

This off-by-one is probably intended behaviour (even though I am curious
to find out why). I would expect something about this to be listed in
the man page of 'wc', but could not find it there.

With kind regards,

Almer S. Tigelaar