To count characters of a text file can be done with a wc
command, which stands for word count, but you can count charactes as well. These instructions apply to text files only, not binaries.
Let’s assume that your file is myfile.txt
. Enter the command in the terminal:
$ wc -m myfile.txt
m
stands for bytes.
The output is the number of charactes in the file. To be precise, the output is number of bytes, so line breaks for example, are counted.