olacin / ccwc

coreutils wc clone

ccwc

The Challenge - Building wc

The TL/DR version is: wc – word, line, character, and byte count.

Usage: ccwc [OPTIONS] [FILE]

Arguments:
  [FILE]  

Options:
  -c, --bytes    Print the byte counts
  -l, --lines    Print the newline counts
  -w, --words    Print the word counts
  -m, --chars    Print the character counts
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Step Zero

Download this text from Project Gutenberg and save it as test.txt.

Step One

In this step your goal is to write a simple version of wc, let’s call it ccwc (cc for Coding Challenges) that takes the command line option -c and outputs the number of bytes in a file.

If you’ve done it right your output should match this:

ccwc -c test.txt
  341836 test.txt

If it doesn’t, check your code, fix any bugs and try again. If it does, congratulations! On to…

Step Two

In this step your goal is to support the command line option -l that outputs the number of lines in a file.

If you’ve done it right your output should match this:

ccwc -l test.txt
    7137 test.txt

If it doesn’t, check your code, fix any bugs and try again. If it does, congratulations! On to…

Step Three

In this step your goal is to support the command line option -w that outputs the number of words in a file. If you’ve done it right your output should match this:

ccwc -w test.txt
   58159 test.txt

If it doesn’t, check your code, fix any bugs and try again. If it does, congratulations! On to…

Step Four

In this step your goal is to support the command line option -m that outputs the number of characters in a file. If the current locale does not support multibyte characters this will match the -c option.

You can learn more about programming for locales here

For this one your answer will depend on your locale, so if can, use wc itself and compare the output to your solution:

wc -m test.txt
  339120 test.txt

ccwc -m test.txt
  339120 test.txt

If it doesn’t, check your code, fix any bugs and try again. If it does, congratulations! On to…

Step Five

In this step your goal is to support the default option - i.e. no options are provided, which is the equivalent to the -c, -l and -w options. If you’ve done it right your output should match this:

ccwc test.txt
    7137   58159  341836 test.txt

If it doesn’t, check your code, fix any bugs and try again. If it does, congratulations! On to…

The Final Step

In this step your goal is to support being able to read from standard input if no filename is specified. If you’ve done it right your output should match this:

cat test.txt | ccwc -l
    7137

If it doesn’t, check your code, fix any bugs and try again. If it does, congratulations! You’ve done it, pat yourself on the back, job well done!