Reputation: 11044

Why does the wc command count one more character than expected?

The following is the content stored in my file

This is my Input

So, using wc -c command we can get the number of characters stored in the file.

My expected output for above file that edited by using Vim in Ubuntu is 16. But, wc -c command returns 17.

Why is the output like this? There isn't even a carriage return at end of line. So, what is the 17th character?

Upvotes: 11

Answers (4)

Shravan Yadav

Reputation: 1317

The input string you are giving as input has no enter/new line, but echo is assigning enter/newline to it. And wc -c reads enter or newline from given by the echo command.

For example

echo k | wc -c

returns 2 because 1 for k and 1 for new line appended by echo.

While

echo -n k | wc -c

returns 1 because -n suppresses the newline.

But wc -c always reads newline.

You can try

printf k | wc -c

It returns 1.

See what it does in file:

bash-4.1$ echo 1234 > newfile
bash-4.1$ cat newfile
1234
bash-4.1$ cat -e newfile
1234$
bash-4.1$ printf 1234 > newfile
bash-4.1$ cat newfile
1234bash-4.1$ cat -e newfile
1234bash-4.1$

Upvotes: 1

chengpohi

Reputation: 14227

In Linux, when Vim saves buffers, it will terminate every line by appending line terminator of new line.

You can open your file and input :!xxd to view hex-dump or directly use hexdump yourfile command.

0000000: 5468 6973 2069 7320 6d79 2049 6e70 7574  This is my Input
0000010: 0a                                       .
~                                                                                                                                 
~                                                                                                                                 
~

In there you can see, the file have appended 0a in the end of file.

So when you use wc -c to get the number of this file, it will return 17 that includes the new line symbol.

Upvotes: 1