wc
mostra 3 caracteres a mais porque seu arquivo de exemplo contém um apóstrofo Unicode ’
(provavelmente porque você copiou o conteúdo de um navegador ou editor de texto):
$ cat file
Amy looked at her watch. He was late. The sun was setting but Jake didn’t care.
$ wc file
1 16 82 file
Com apóstrofo ASCII simples '
:
$ cat file2
Amy looked at her watch. He was late. The sun was setting but Jake didn't care.
$ wc file
1 16 80 file2
Por padrão, wc
exibe o número de bytes por manual :
newline, word, and byte counts for each file
para contagem de caracteres, um argumento -m
pode ser usado:
$ cat file
Amy looked at her watch. He was late. The sun was setting but Jake didn’t care.
$ wc -m file
80 file.txt