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