Re: wordcount (wc)

[Brock Noland]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:27 AM, Almer S. Tigelaar <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

Its counting the trailing newline.

$ echo "12345" | wc -m
6
$ printf "12345\n" | wc -m
6
$ printf "12345" | wc -m
5
$ echo -n "12345" | wc -m
5

Brock