Why does wc count one extra character in my file?

Question

1.) I am using Debian 8.4 on a virtual box and as I ran the command wc sample.txt to sample.txt containing:

Hello

The output to the command was

1 1 6 sample.txt

Is the extra character EOF? If it is then how come when I ran the same command for an empty file the output was..

0 0 0 sample.txt

Answer 1

You have a trailing new line and this is what wc reports.

See for example if we create a file with printf:

$ printf "hello" > a
$ cat a | hexdump -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o
0000005
$ wc a
0 1 5 a

However, if we write with something like echo, a trailing new line is appended:

$ echo "hello" > a
$ cat a | hexdump -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o  \n
0000006
$ wc a
1 1 6 a