Find word count using wc and assign to a variable

Question

i want the word count wc -w value be assigned to a variable

i've tried something like this, but i'm getting error, what is wrong?

winget="this is the first line"

wdCount=$winget | wc -w

echo $wdCount

Answer 1

You need to $(...) to assign the result:

wdCount=$(echo $winget | wc -w)

Or you could also avoid echo by using here-document:

wdCount=$(wc -w <<<$winget)

Answer 2

You can pass word count without the filename using the following:

num_of_lines=$(< "$file" wc -w)

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/126999/320461