ccwc

Unix wc tool implemented from scratch with Go

This Repo hosts my solution to the wc coding challenge on https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-wc/ by John Cricket

Usage

  -c	Count bytes
  -l	Count lines
  -m	Count characters
  -w	Count words

It supports piping from standard input as well

cat test.txt | go run main.go

Try it out

1. Clone this repo with git.
2. You will find test.txt inside this repo.
3. Run go run main.go -l test.txt to count the lines in a file.

Challenges

My biggest challenge was supporting piping from standard input when no flags are provided. Eg: cat test.txt | go run main.go This may be an OS thing(I'm using MacOS) but apparently, os.Stdin does not support Seek operations. This made it difficult to count words, lines, bytes, and characters simultaneously without moving everything to memory, which will be inefficient for big files.

Checkout my solution to this in wc.go in the CountAll function