Counting number of characters in a file through shell script

Question

I want to check the no of characters in a file from starting to EOF character  Can anyone tell me how to do this through shell script

User · Accepted Answer

This will do it   wc -c filename   If you want only the count without the filename being repeated in the output   wc -c  lt  filename   Edit   Use -m to count character instead of bytes  as shown in S  bastien s answer

User · Answer

Credits to user py et al     echo         gt   tmp your file txt cat  tmp your file txt   wc -m   results in 3   In my example the result is expected to be 2  twice the letter      However  echo  or vi  adds a line break  n to the end of the output  or file   So two    and one Linux line break  n are counted  That s three together   Working with pipes   is not the shortest variant  but so I have to know less wc parameters by heart  In addition  cat is bullet-proof in my experience   Tested on Ubuntu 18 04 1 LTS  Bionic Beaver

User · Answer

awk only  awk  BEGIN FS     for i 1 i lt  NF i   c   END print  total chars  c   file   shell only  var    lt file  echo    var    Ruby 1 9    ruby -0777 -ne  print    size  file

User · Answer

awk   t  length  0  END print t   file3

User · Answer

The following script is tested and gives exactly the results  that are expected      bin bash  echo  Enter the file name   read file  echo  enter the word to be found   read word  count 0  for i in   cat  file   do  if    i     word    then  count   expr  count   1   fi  done  echo  The number of words are  count

User · Answer

I would have thought that it would be better to use stat to find the size of a file  since the filesystem knows it already  rather than causing the whole file to have to be read with awk or wc - especially if it is a multi-GB file or one  that may be non-resident in the file-system on an HSM   stat -c s file   Yes  I concede it doesn t account for multi-byte characters  but would add that the OP has never clarified whether that is was an issue

User · Answer

To get exact character count of string  use printf  as opposed to echo  cat  or running wc -c directly on a file  because using echo  cat  etc will count a newline character  which will give you the amount of characters including the newline character  So a file with the text  hello  will print 6 if you use echo etc  but if you use printf it will return the exact 5  because theres no newline element to count   How to use printf for counting characters within strings    printf  6chars    wc -m 6   To turn this into a script you can run on a text file to count characters  save the following in a file called print-character-amount sh      bin bash characters   cat   1   printf   characters    wc -m   chmod  x on file print-character-amount sh containing above text  place the file in your PATH  i e   usr bin  or any directory exported as PATH in your  bashrc file  then to run script on text file type   print-character-amount sh file-to-count-characters-of txt

User · Answer

bin sh  wc -m  1   awk   print  1     wc -m counts the number of characters  the awk command prints the number of characters only  omitting the filename   wc -c would give you the number of bytes  which can be different to the number of characters  as depending on the encoding you may have a character encoded on several bytes

[linux] Counting number of characters in a file through shell script

Examples related to linux

Examples related to shell