wcgo

wcgo is a Go implementation of the classic wc (word count) command-line tool, providing a fast and efficient way to count words, lines, and characters in text files. The aim is to offer functionality similar to wc while utilizing Go's language features and concurrency model to get some extra performance.

Features

Line Count: Count the number of lines in a text file.
Word Count: Count the number of words in a text file.
Character Count: Count the number of characters in a text file.
Multiple Files: Supports processing multiple text files.
Standard In: Supports Standard In (> and pipe works)
Concurrency[WiP]: Utilize Go's concurrency model for handling multiple files efficiently.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Ensure you have Go installed on your system. wcgo requires Go version 1.13 or later. You can check your Go version by running:

go version

Installing

Clone the wcgo repo to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/AayuStark007/wcgo.git
cd wcgo

Build

Build the binary with:

go build

The executable wcgo is generated in the current directory.

Running `wcgo`

Run ./wcgo --help to view the full help options

$ ./wcgo --help
A Go implementation of wc to print newline, word, and byte counts for each file

Usage:
  wcgo [file]... [flags]

Flags:
  -c, --bytes   print the byte counts
  -m, --chars   print the character counts
  -d, --debug   debug mode
  -h, --help    help for wcgo
  -l, --lines   print the newline counts
  -w, --words   print the word counts

Additionally you can specify the filename:

./wcgo examples/test.txt

Usage Examples

Count words in example.txt

./wcgo -w example.txt

Count lines in example.txt

./wcgo -l example.txt

Count words, lines and bytes via Standard Input

cat example.txt | ./wcgo

Process multiple files

./wcgo file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

Limitations

Since, this project is in development, some features of classic wc are yet to be implemented:

Support for passing - as file to enable reading from stdin
Support for fixed with printing (currently output is space separated)

Since, we are implementing this in Go, this allows scope for utilizing some language features for more performance:

Using Goroutines for processing multiple files concurrently.
Using buffered io to handle large files without using up too much memory

License

wcgo is open-sourced under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

Acknowledgments

This project is inspired by the original UNIX wc command.
Motivation was from the challenges posted at Coding Challenges FYI.

TODO

benchmarks
fixes for word counting in binary files
performance tuning
efficient concurrency (vs goroutine per file)

AayuStark007/wcgo