People have solved puzzles by hand in the past. No tool is off limit, including your brain, pen, and paper.

I would say the only thing that's "cheating" would be looking up solutions to "solve" the problem faster than other people, whether they be the rest of the world on the global leaderboard (which is unlikely since the people who make the leaderboard are good about not posting solutions until it's full) or some friends you're competing with on a private leaderboard.

Otherwise, let your conscience be your guide. As the saying goes, when you cheat, you're only cheating yourself.

That's for you to decide but the point of the exercise, besides having fun, is finding a solution. If wc is something you'd use to solve a similar problem, seems reasonable to use it here too and within the spirit of the challenge.

Nah, not in my opinion. Use whatever you want to solve the problems. Ultimately you have to submit an answer to the site for the day.

Even then, if you go and look up solutions it's still up to you whether or not you call that cheating.

When I download my input data I have it print out the number of lines in the process. I find this to be quite helpful, in general.

Any software tools are acceptable. I used Excel to solve 2021 day 1