Manual Pages  — WC

A word is defined as a string of characters delimited by white space characters. White space characters are the set of characters for which the iswspace(3) function returns true. If more than one input file is specified, a line of cumulative counts for all the files is displayed on a separate line after the output for the last file.

The following options are available:

--libxo
	Generate output via libxo(3) in a selection of different human and machine readable formats. See xo_parse_args(3) for details on command line arguments.
-L
	Write the length of the line containing the most bytes (default) or characters (when -m is provided) to standard output. When more than one file argument is specified, the longest input line of all files is reported as the value of the final "total".
-c
	The number of bytes in each input file is written to the standard output. This will cancel out any prior usage of the -m option.
-l
	The number of lines in each input file is written to the standard output.
-m
	The number of characters in each input file is written to the standard output. If the current locale does not support multibyte characters, this is equivalent to the -c option. This will cancel out any prior usage of the -c option.
-w
	The number of words in each input file is written to the standard output.

When an option is specified, wc only reports the information requested by that option. The order of output always takes the form of line, word, byte, and file name. The default action is equivalent to specifying the -c -, -l and -w options.

If no files are specified, the standard input is used and no file name is displayed. The prompt will accept input until receiving EOF, or [^D] in most environments.

If wc receives a SIGINFO (see the status argument for stty(1)) signal, the interim data will be written to the standard error output in the same format as the standard completion message.

The -L option is a non-standard FreeBSD extension, compatible with the -L option of the GNU wc utility.