Count the number of characters, words and lines in PowerShell

Question

In Linux we have the "wc" command which allows us to count the number of characters, words and lines in a file.

But do we have a similar cmdlet in PowerShell. The Measure-Object cmdlet I tried could only count the number of lines but not the characters and words.

Merete

the Measure-Object cmdlet CAN count lines, words, and chars. please add your code to the Question so we can see what needs changing. – Groovy

It works. Unfortunately, Measure-Object seems to be much slower than wc. – Nahum

Answer 1

Get-Content [FILENAME] | Measure-Object -Character

It counts the number of characters in the file.

Get-Content [FILENAME] | Measure-Object -Word

It counts the number of words in the file.

Get-Content [FILENAME] | Measure-Object -Line

It counts the number of lines in the file.

Milagro

Also just cat [filename] | measure -w -c -l using the built-in aliases. – Eal

Answer 2

Measure-Object do exactly that. You do have to specify the parameters you want measured for the characters, words and lines to be returned.

Example 3: Measure text in a text file

This command displays the number of characters, words, and lines in the Text.txt file. Without the Raw parameter, Get-Content outputs the file as an array of lines.

The first command uses Set-Content to add some default text to a file.

"One", "Two", "Three", "Four" | Set-Content -Path C:\Temp\tmp.txt
Get-Content C:\Temp\tmp.txt | Measure-Object -Character -Line -Word

Lines Words Characters Property
----- ----- ---------- --------
    4     4         15

Reference: Microsoft.Powershell.Utility/measure-object

Faction

Answer 3

If you want to count all words in all text files in a directory:

Get-ChildItem <INPUT_FOLDER_PATH> -Recurse -Filter *.txt | Get-Content | measure -Word -Line - Character

Villanelle

Answer 4

type '.\filename.txt' | Measure-Object -Line -Word -Character

Gets you everything. type takes far less time to type for text based files.

Ossian