Why does the wc command count one more character than expected?

Question

The following is the content stored in my file

This is my Input

So, using wc -c command we can get the number of characters stored in the file.

My expected output for above file that edited by using Vim in Ubuntu is 16. But, wc -c command returns 17.

Why is the output like this? There isn't even a carriage return at end of line. So, what is the 17th character?

Answer 1

Of course you had enter. Maybe you can't see it. Consider these two examples:

echo -n "This is my Input" | wc -c
16

Because -n is for avoiding enter, but

echo "This is my Input" | wc -c
17

Look at this example too see the new line:

How to see newline?

echo "This is my Input" | od -c

od dumps files in octal and other formats. -c selects ASCII characters or backslash escapes.

And here is an example for file and usage of od:

Answer 2

In Linux, when Vim saves buffers, it will terminate every line by appending line terminator of new line.

You can open your file and input :!xxd to view hex-dump or directly use hexdump yourfile command.

0000000: 5468 6973 2069 7320 6d79 2049 6e70 7574  This is my Input
0000010: 0a                                       .
~                                                                                                                                 
~                                                                                                                                 
~    

In there you can see, the file have appended 0a in the end of file.

So when you use wc -c to get the number of this file, it will return 17 that includes the new line symbol.