Coding-Challenges

Build Your Own wc Tool

Overview

This project involves creating a custom version of the Unix command-line tool wc. The wc (word count) command is used to count the number of lines, words, and bytes (or characters) in files. This challenge is to build a simplified version of wc that supports some basic options.

The tool will read a file and output counts for:

• Number of lines
• Number of words
• Number of characters (for UTF-8 encoded files)
• Number of bytes

Features

• Count Lines (-l): Counts the number of newline characters in the file.
• Count Words (-w): Counts the number of words in the file. A word is defined as a non-zero-length sequence of characters delimited by whitespace.
• Count Characters (-m): Counts the number of characters in the file. For UTF-8 encoded files, this is the number of Unicode characters.
• Count Bytes (-c): Counts the number of bytes in the file.
• Help (--help): Displays usage information and options for the tool.

Usage

Use the following command:

gcc ccwc.c -o wc

Examples

1. Count Lines in a File

   ./wc -l test.txt 
   

   

2. Count Words in a File

   ./wc -w test.txt 
   

   

3. Count Characters in a File

   ./wc -m test.txt 
   

   

4. Count Bytes in a File

./wc -c test.txt 

1. Default wc Behavior

   ./wc test.txt 
   

   

2. Display Help Information

   ./wc --help 
   

   

3. Read from standard input

   cat test.txt |./wc
   

   

Contributing

Feel free to contribute to this project by submitting pull requests or opening issues for improvements and bug fixes.