Recipe: Counting No of lines, words, characters in a file 

Counting the number of lines
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$ seq 15 > file
$ wc -l file
15 file

Counting the number of lines from stdin
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$ cat file | wc -l
15

Counting the number of words
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$ echo 'hello how are you' > text
$ wc -w text
4 file

$ cat text | wc -w
4

Counting number of characters
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$ wc -c text
18 text

$ cat text | wc -c
18

$ echo -n 1234 | wc -c
4

$ wc text
 1  4 18 text

Print length of longest length line
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$ seq 15 >file
$ wc file -L
2 file