There are numerous situations where of the following mycount = wc -l somefile mycount is very very often followed by cut -d' ' -f1 as lines=$(wc -l somefile | cat -d' ' -f1)
In otherwords, we want the numerical value lines, but not the text following. A new flag, -n would be useful as in lines=wc -t somefile to be equivalent to lines=$(wc -l somefile | cat -d' ' -f1). Savings would be the piping of the wc output followed by call to external file "cut". -t for truncated
