NAME

count - counts items in a file

SYNOPSIS

count [ options ] file1 ... filen

DESCRIPTION

Count reads all of the specified files and produces one line of output for each input file: the number of the characters, the number of 'words', and the number of lines in the specified files. 'Words' is an arbitrary term in reference to programs, because they tend to have a lot of punctuation. For text files a word is a sequence of characters separated by white space.

If more than one file is given, a grand total is also printed. If no filenames are given, count reads from standard input. Any combination of options works; the default is (-c -w -l -llen -t).

OPTIONS

All options except tab= and -llen can be abbreviated to their first letter. The option -llen can be abbreviated with -ll.

-chars: Counts characters based on bytes.
-mchars: Counts multi byte characters.
-words: Counts words.
-lines: Counts lines.
-llen: Counts maximum line length.
tab=tab width: Set the width of a tab to tab width for counting maximum line length.
-stat: Use stat(2) system call to get the character count of a file. This is much faster but cannot count anything but characters.
-total: Grand totals of several files.
-help: Prints a short summary of the count options and exists.
-version: Prints the count version number string and exists.

NOTES

none

BUGS

none

AUTHOR

Joerg Schilling
D-13353 Berlin
Germany

Mail bugs and suggestions to:

joerg@schily.net