Why does wc increase character count by 1 ?

[Matt Smith]

On Sep 09 18:10, Manish Jain wrote:
>Hi,
>
>echo "abc 123" | wc -c
>
>I would expect wc to output 7, but actually I get 8.
>
>Indeed, I see similar behaviour with 'echo | wc -c'
>This should produce 0, but I get 1
>
>What might be the problem ? Thanks for any tips.
>Manish Jain

It's counting the \n linefeed. Try these:

echo "abc 123" | od -c

echo -n "abc 123" | od -c

echo -n "abc 123" | wc -c

-- 
Matt