wc annoyances

[Daniel Russell]

Using wc in scripts is annoying because of the fact that this:

wc -l/m/c FILENAME

prints this:

        NUMBER FILENAME

And there appears to be no options to turn this behavior off. Of course, 
I would like to use wc a lot in scripts, without having to pipe into it. 
I would like to have no leading whitespace, and would most definitely 
like to have no filename. Such behavior breaks scripts like this:

echo -n $([ `cat autolist-next.num` -gt `wc -l autolist.txt` ] && echo 1 
|| echo 0)

bash complains that there are too many arguments to [ ]  because of the 
uncessary filename.

Can we have an options "-b"/"--bare" which would strip leading and 
trailing whitespace and print only the number requested??

Thanks! :)