7

I have been trying to create a file called ~/dictwords.txt, which contains the number of words found in the file /usr/share/dict/words.

I already created the file then I removed it because I did it wrong I originally did the echo command. Then I tried this command and was so excited because I thought I was correct.

wc -w /usr/share/dict/words > ~/dictwords.txt

It's still wrong, I am supposed to have just the number, without a file name.

Improve this question
0

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
7

By default, wc print result along with filenames. If you want only the result, you must make wc read input from stdin:

</usr/share/dict/words wc -w > ~/dicwords.txt

With your current solution, you can use some other tools to get only the result from wc, like cut, awk, grep...

wc -w /usr/share/dict/words | cut -d' ' -f1 > ~/dicwords.txt

Though that assumes an implementation of wc that doesn't add space characters before the number, which is not the case of every wc implementation.

Improve this answer
1

If you will need to use the words count in the script, you can save the value into a variable:

numWords=$(wc -w /usr/share/dict/words | tr -dc '0-9')

else, you can save it into the file:

wc -w /usr/share/dict/words | tr -dc '0-9' > ~/dicwords.txt
Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    This would potentially produce unexpected results if the pathname of the input contained digits. In the case of /usr/share/dict/words it's obviously fine.
    – Kusalananda ♦
    Sep 2, 2021 at 16:10
1

The file /usr/share/dict/words ought to contain one word per line. On some systems I imagine that it could possibly contain one "dictionary term" per line and that each of these may be made up from more than one space-delimited word, but I have never seen this myself.

You get the number of lines with one of

  • wc -l </usr/share/dict/words (counts the number of newlines in the file)
  • sed -n '$=' /usr/share/dict/words (at the last line, output the current line number)
  • awk 'END { print NR }' /usr/share/dict/words (at the end of input, output the number of records (lines) read)
  • grep -c '[^[:space:]]' /usr/share/dict/words (count the number of lines that have at least one non-space(-like) character)

Of these, the wc -l variation is least portable as it may output, or not output, extra spaces before and/or after the actual number.

Improve this answer
0
0 
awk 'BEGIN{sum=0}{sum=sum+NF}END{print sum}' /usr/share/dict/words >~/dictwords.txt
Improve this answer
-1

Here is a solution using cat, which avoids printing the filename after the result. 

cat /usr/share/dict/words | wc -w
Improve this answer
5
  • @StephenKitt: What additional explanation do you want? It seems pretty thorough and useful to me.
    – Flimzy
    Dec 7, 2018 at 12:08
  • @Flimzy it’s effectively the same as </usr/share/dict/words wc -w in the accepted answer, so as-is it’s not useful.
    – Stephen Kitt
    Dec 7, 2018 at 12:33
  • No, it's quite different. As explained (in not so many words), by reading stdin, wc omits the filename in the output.
    – Flimzy
    Dec 7, 2018 at 12:34
  • It also reads the file into a pipe and feeds it back out out into wc, which is minor but still worse than using cut and friends on wc's result. You can save a few keystrokes, I guess.
    – Backgammon
    Sep 25, 2019 at 15:52
  • 1
    @Flimzy Using a redirection into wc, as Stephen showed in his comment, makes wc read the file from standard input.
    – Kusalananda ♦
    Sep 2, 2021 at 16:10

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .