Script to report number of characters, words & lines in a file

While browsing through a shell scripting forum I came across a problem statement stating that someone wanted to write a script to report number of characters, words & lines in a file without using the wc command which would have been well very straight forward. 

So I decided to give it a try & after a while to some hits & misses I got a working script ready. 

Here is the script:

[root@cclient1 ~]# cat filecheck.sh

#!/bin/bash

case $2 in

-h) echo -e "The number of letters in file are: \n"

        b=0

        for i in `cat $1 | tr -d " "`

        do

        a=$(expr length $i)

        let b+=$a

        done

        echo $b

        ;;

-k) echo -e "The number of words in the file are: \n"

    awk  '{total=total+NF}; END {print total  }' $1

        ;;

-s) echo -e "The number of lines in file are: \n"

    awk  ' END {print NR }' $1

        ;;

*) echo "Incorrect usage"

    ;;

esac

Below is a description of what's happening.

• In the first part, the for loop iterates through each line of the file. I used tr to remove spaces so that the entire line is treated as a single string. Then I used expr built in to calculate the length of the string & finally used let to add the values for string lengths of the individual lines.
• In the second part, I used the number of fields built in variable in awk to sum up the number of fields in each line & print the final result.
• In the final part, I used the number of records built in from awk to display the number of lines in the file.

Here's a demo of the script in action:

[root@cclient1 ~]# cat test

sa hi l su ri

un ix li n ux

hp ux

[root@cclient1 ~]# ./filecheck.sh test -h

The number of letters in file are:

22

[root@cclient1 ~]# ./filecheck.sh test -k

The number of words in the file are:

12

[root@cclient1 ~]# ./filecheck.sh test -s

The number of lines in file are:

3