The wc (word count) command in Linux operating system is used to find out the number of new lines, word count, byte and characters count in a file specified by the file arguments. Shows the output as - 120 readme.txt wc -l : Prints the number of lines in a file. wc -w : prints the number of words in a file. wc -c : Displays the count of bytes in a file. wc -m : prints the count of characters from a file. wc -L : prints only the length of the longest line in a file.