2016-10-17 krt mentioned `wc -m' to me. I was irritated by the `-m' flag. It smelled much like a GNU extension, because it does not match the POSIX way of dealing with the same issue in cut(1). But no, `wc -m' is POSIX! [0] It's sad to see this inconsistency in POSIX. But as POSIX tries to only describe the common reality in the Unix world, it's an inconsistency there. Conceptually, the cut approach (`-c' = ``char'' and `-b' = ``byte'') is the better one that then `-m' (= multi-byte) flag. [0] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/wc.html http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke