The Unix command line tools are a great metaphor for good software engineering and they follow the Unix Philosophies of:
Writing simple parts connected by clean interfaces - each tool does just one thing and provides a simple CLI that handles text input from either files or file streams. Design programs to be connected to other programs - each tool can be easily connected to other tools to create incredibly powerful compositions. Following these philosophies has made the simple unix command line tools some of the most widely used software engineering tools - allowing us to create very complex text data processing pipelines from simple command line tools. There’s even a Coursera course on Linux and Bash for Data Engineering.
You can read more about the Unix Philosophy in the excellent book The Art of Unix Programming.
The functional requirements for wc are concisely described by it’s man page - give it a go in your local terminal now:
man wc$ go run .
WC Arguments:
-f FILENAME, --filename FILENAME
The input file, or standard input (if no file is specified) to the standard output.
-c, --bytes The number of bytes in each input file is written to the standard output.
-l, --lines The number of lines in each input file is written to the standard output.
-m, --characters The number of characters in each input file is written to the standard output.
-w, --words The number of words in each input file is written to the standard output.
Enter the filename here:
test.txt
Want to get size in bytes: [y/n]
Want to get total number of lines in the file: [y/n]
Want to get total number of characters in the file: [y/n]
Want to get total number of words in the file: [y/n]
Information
File Name: test.txt
Permissions: -rw-r--r--
Last Modified: 2023-10-07 20:58:50.640676903 +0530 IST
Size (in bytes): 335041
Total lines: 7144
Total characters: 332145
Total words: 58164Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.
Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.