Re: wc enhancement request: total option

[Philip Rowlands]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Kevin Ivory wrote:

> Hi coreutils team,
>
> wc gives a grand total when analyzing several files.
> It would be helpful to have a command line option that
> returns only the total. It should be able to combine
> with -c/-l/-w to return only the total characters /
> total lines / total words.

It's usually preferable to combine the features of several coreutils 
rather than add new code. In this case the desired result can be 
obtained with:

$ wc *.txt | tail -n 1
  485  1861 13078 total

If required, this could be wrapped up in a shell script or alias to save 
typing if used frequently.


Cheers,
Phil