wc -m in linux excess 1 value

Question

md5sum file.png | awk '{print $1}' | wc -m

I get: 33
I expect it will return 32 as the length of md5 hash. After read man page and googling I still didn't find out why.

Answer 1

TL;DR

Use awk's length() function:

md5sum file.png | awk '{print length($1)}'
32

---

It's because awk will add a line feed character to the output. You can check:

md5sum file.png | awk '{print $1}' | xxd

You can tell awk to not doing that using ORS output record separator variable:

md5sum file.png | awk '{print $1}' ORS='' | wc -m
32