A minimal clone of the classic Linux wc (word count) command, written in C.
This project was inspired by coding challenges I came across (special thanks to John Cricket from Code Challenges and the community post that sparked the idea).
The goal was to build a working version of wc in under 2 hours, so the current implementation is intentionally minimal but fully functional — supporting reading from both files and stdin.
- Count lines, words, and bytes.
- Works with stdin and file input.
- Flag support:
-l→ line count-w→ word count-c→ byte count
- Clean separation into multiple source files with CMake build support.
This project is just the foundation — I plan to expand it further:
- Add support for additional flags (
-m,-L, etc.). - Support multiple files (with totals, like GNU
wc). - Handle larger files efficiently (buffered reading).
- Error handling and better flag parsing.
- Colored output / formatting options.
- Unit tests to validate correctness.
I wanted to challenge myself to replicate a real Linux tool in pure C. The time-boxed goal (2 hours) forced me to focus on the essentials while leaving space for future improvements.
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make