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How To: Count Letters, Words, and Lines

Today’s article isn’t going to be all that interesting unless you happen to want to know how to count letters, words, and lines in a file. If you’re worried about publication length, a student, or perhaps a journalist, this might be the article for you.

For everyone else? Well, you can read this as a curiosity. It’s one of the neat things you can do with your Linux terminal, but probably not the most interesting of things. Still, you can probably find a way to have fun counting letters (characters, really), words, and lines in the Linux terminal. Who doesn’t want to have fun in the terminal?!?

The tool we’ll be using is ‘wc’ and it will almost certainly be installed by default. The wc application will be installed by default on some of the smallest Linux distros. It’s a tool that does this:

wc – print newline, word, and byte counts for each file

That happily sums up why we’ll be using wc in this article’s exercise. It is the most appropriate tool for the job, installed by default, and remarkably easy to use. If you want to count a file’s letters, words, and lines, this is the tool for you. You can learn a lot about this very tool by checking the man page. To do that, just type:

man wc

man wc

If that doesn’t spit out some information, you don’t have wc installed and should install it. Assuming it does, and it should let’s get into the meat of the article…

Count Letters Words And Lines:

Oh yes… I mentioned the terminal in the intro. That means you’ll need an open terminal for this. It isn’t easy to word this differently in every article, but you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, you can first count the letters (characters) in a file. That’s nice and easy. It’s just this command:

wc -m <file_name>

1	wc -m <file_name>

For example, let’s use a file most of you will have:

wc -m ~/.bash_history

1	wc -m ~/.bash_history

See? Nice and simple…

Now, if you want to count the words in a file, that’s just this command:

wc -w <file_name>

1	wc -w <file_name>

Finally, if you want to count the number of lines in a file, you can do just that. The command is fairly obvious and looks like this:

wc -l <file_name>

1	wc -l <file_name>

Now, of course, there are other options with the wc command, but I’ve covered the few that you’re most likely to use. The intro had a command that will show you the man page and you should use that if you have any questions about what more the command can do.

Closure:

Yeah, this is a nice and simple article. It’s only useful for those folks who want to count letters, words, and lines. There’s a subset of users who will want to know this. For instance, I ran this on a computer I don’t use that often and discovered that I’d never set up an infinite bash history file on this computer.

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Let’s Password Protect A File

Today’s article is a fun one, where we’ll learn how to password protect a file using something called GPG. It’s not complicated. You can learn how to password protect a file in just a few minutes. You can then send these files out and other people can decrypt them – assuming you’ve shared the password with them.

We all have secrets. They’re not all digital, but they could be. We may also want to be able to share files that have private information in them, meaning you only want people with the password to open it. Though, I suppose, brute force is always an option – but you can at least make it difficult by using a complex password, preferably one that you didn’t generate yourself.

So, what is GPG? GPG stands for “GNU Privacy Guard”. It’s fairly standard and used quite a bit. There are other applications, like PGP, but I think all of you folks that use a ‘full’ distro will have GPG installed by default. It’s one of those tools that you might not use all that often, but it seems to be included by default in a lot of places. I suspect that’s because other things rely on GPG, but I’m way too ~~lazy~~ inept to look that up.

By the way, the GPG man page describes it as:

gpg – OpenPGP encryption and signing tool

That GPG is what we’re going to be using for this exercise. Trust me, it’s easier than you might think.

Password Protect A File:

Do I have to mention it? Of course I do! It’s time for your favorite thing, an open terminal ready for your commands. You can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

With your terminal now open, the command to password protect a file would be:

gpg -c /path/to/file

1	gpg -c /path/to/file

The -c flag stands for encryption. It should then ask you for a password, that you’ll need to enter twice, and then it will make an encrypted copy of the file with a .gpg extension. The original file will still exist, so this isn’t encrypting that original file. It’s making an encrypted copy and you’ll want to safely delete the original file if that’s your intention.

Now, to open the new <file_name>.gpg file, you’ll need to use the following command:

gpg <file_name>.gpg

1	gpg <file_name>.gpg

Now, when I went to open that with the same computer and the same session it didn’t ask for a password. I shipped it to another computer and it did just that. I do not know why.

When you successfully open the password protected file, it will ask you if you want to overwrite the original. This shouldn’t happen when you ship it to someone else unless they happen to already have a file with that specific name. It also will let you say don’t want to overwrite the file and let you pick a new file name for the unencrypted content.

Closure:

You can actually do this with a folder if you’d prefer. It’s just specifying a folder instead of a file. The process is exactly the same. So, like I said in the start, it’s a really easy task to password protect a file. The terminal is useful for all sorts of stuff.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

How To: Find Out Which Window Manager You’re Using

Today’s article shouldn’t be all that long or difficult, as we simply go over how to find out which window manager you’re using. In the Linux world, this is often abbreviated as “WM” but we’ll avoid using the abbreviation ’cause of search engines. Yeah, search engines have a lot to do with how this (and every other) site is configured – including deciding how I write articles.

Yay! We need to appeal to you AND the algorithms. We’re all slaves to the machine!

So, what is a window manager? We can cheat and cite the Arch Wiki (a brilliant source for all things Linux). They define window managers as:

A window manager (WM) is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface (GUI). It can be part of a desktop environment (DE) or be used standalone.

Further, there are the following clues:

Window managers are X clients that control the appearance and behaviour of the frames (“windows”) where the various graphical applications are drawn. They determine the border, title bar, size, and ability to resize windows, and often provide other functionality such as reserved areas for sticking dockapps like Window Maker, or the ability to tab windows like Fluxbox. Some window managers are even bundled with simple utilities like menus to start programs or to configure the window manager itself.

Now, in modern times, most of you will be using the window manager that came with your distro and you’ll just leave it as the default. This article is for that person – the person who didn’t install their window manager and doesn’t know which window manager they’re using.

Which Display Manager Are You Using:

You guessed it! You’re going to need to use a terminal for this. Oh, there are surely GUI ways to do this, but I know you have a terminal. You can just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal.

With your terminal, you can run the following command:

wmctrl -m

wmctrl -m

If that command doesn’t spit out the information you’re after, you may need to install it. Your trusty default terminal should happily tell you how to install wmctrl, but it’d be (in Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/etc) something like this:

sudo apt install wmctrl

1	sudo apt install wmctrl

Of course, if you have Neofetch installed, you can just run Neofetch. Like ‘wmctrl’, you might need to install it. You might as well install it, though you could just as easily use Screenfetch. You get to pick which one you want to use, but it’ll be listed under the aforementioned abbreviation of “WM”. See? Foreshadowing! I can’t believe you read this nonsense.

So, there are a few options to find out which window manager you’re using. You can pick which you like most, but either of the *fetch applications will give you more system information. Do what you must…

Closure:

I planned on another article, but this one seemed like a more interesting article to write today. As it seemed more interesting to share how to find which window manager you’re using, I decided to go with that one.

These “easier” articles take about the same amount of time to write. The subject is often decided by what I feel is the most interesting. You can always start your own site and write along with me. There’s room for all of us!

How To Tell If You’re Using Wayland Or X11

Today’s article will be an interesting one, for at least a subset of readers, as we learn how to tell if you’re using Wayland or X11. The command isn’t all that difficult and is just a single command that should work with everything, but the topic might confuse some of you.

Frankly, if you ask this question to the majority of users, you’re probably going to find out that they’re still using X11. The move to Wayland has been a process, that started back in 2008. The goal is to replace X and provide a much better set of protocols.

That’s what Wayland is… It’s a set of protocols dealing with how things are displayed on your monitor. X is also a set of protocols for the display server – and it dates back to 1984. Without X (or something else), we’d have been staring at nothing but terminal outputs this entire time, so it is kind of a big deal.

That doesn’t mean the current X implementation is that old on your device, it just means that it has been the default for a long time. The upstart, that is Wayland, is meant to take care of a variety of flaws – including potential security flaws. That’d be a subject way too deep to get into today.

Currently, some distros are confident with Wayland and release distros that default to Wayland. Some offer it as an option, without it being the default. The GNOME and KDE desktop environments are currently the closest to being ‘Wayland-ready’. It’s a slow process!

So, you might not know if you’re using Wayland or X11 and this article tells you how to check just that.

Are You Using Wayland Or X11:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, just run the following command: (It should work in any distro, regardless of which display server you’re running.)

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

1	echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

The output should look a lot like this:

kgiii@kgiii-desktop~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

1 2	kgiii@kgiii-desktop~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE x11

Unless you’re using Wayland. In that case, it’d look something like this:

kgiii@kgiii-desktop~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
Wayland

1 2	kgiii@kgiii-desktop~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE Wayland

If the output says x11, you’re not using Wayland. If it says Wayland, you’re using Wayland. I probably didn’t need to specify this, but I did. This way, you can be completely sure if you’re using Wayland or x11.

Closure:

See? There’s a fun command you can play around with. If you’re not sure if you’re using Wayland or X11, this command will get you sorted quickly and easily. There are all sorts of great things you can do with an open terminal and a little bit of knowledge.

List The Files In A Directory

Today’s article is only going to be useful if you are a new user and don’t yet know how to list files in a directory. This is, of course, something you do in a terminal. I do believe this will be a quick and easy article, so read on if you don’t yet know how to list files in a directory.

If you’ve used Linux for more than a month, you can safely ignore this article.

Yes, this has been covered all over the web. This isn’t anything remotely new, nor is it anything all that complicated. However, this is a holiday weekend and I figure it’s a good article for new users who happen to be just browsing around. I’ve also covered some ‘ls’ commands before.

On the other hand, it should be a short article! So, there’s that!

List The Files In A Directory:

Of course, this article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. Should you not know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard. Press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With that terminal now open, let’s try a simple command:

ls

That will list all the files in the directory. If you’d like to see the output in columns, you can always try this command which lists the output in a denser manner.

ls -l

ls -l

That command doesn’t list dot (hidden) files. Seeing as you’re in the home directory, you should have some hidden files. If you want to use the ‘ls’ command to show files, you need the -a flag. You can combine it with the above and use this command:

ls -la

ls -la

That’s the command I use more often than not. This being Linux, you get to decide which how to use the command. I think I type the ‘ls -la‘ command out of habit.

Closure:

Well, you got an article. Sure, it’s a simple article but someone may find this important information. Of course, they could just use the man page – but what’s the fun in that?