Add List And Count All Posts In TIL Repo as a Git TIL

README.md

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ working across different projects via [VisualMode](https://www.visualmode.dev/).
 
 For a steady stream of TILs, [sign up for my newsletter](https://visualmode.kit.com/newsletter).
 
-_1850 TILs and counting..._
+_1851 TILs and counting..._
 
 See some of the other learning resources I work on:
 
@@ -402,6 +402,7 @@ If you've learned something here, support my efforts writing daily TILs by
 - [List All Files Added During Span Of Time](git/list-all-files-added-during-span-of-time.md)
 - [List All Files Changed Between Two Branches](git/list-all-files-changed-between-two-branches.md)
 - [List All Git Aliases From gitconfig](git/list-all-git-aliases-from-gitconfig.md)
+- [List And Count All Posts In TIL Repo](git/list-and-count-all-posts-in-til-repo.md)
 - [List Branches That Contain A Commit](git/list-branches-that-contain-a-commit.md)
 - [List Commits On A Branch](git/list-commits-on-a-branch.md)
 - [List Different Commits Between Two Branches](git/list-different-commits-between-two-branches.md)

git/list-and-count-all-posts-in-til-repo.md

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+# List And Count All Posts In TIL Repo
+
+I want to be able to reliably list and count all posts in [my TIL
+repo](https://github.com/jbranchaud/til). I do this to check that the count in
+the README is accurate and in [the workflow
+script](https://github.com/jbranchaud/jbranchaud/blob/71cba39dffb2bff68bf16d8895e435065e400250/scripts/update_tils.py#L101)
+that powers [my GitHub Profile
+README](https://github.com/jbranchaud/jbranchaud). In the past, I've used
+pattern matching on the listing of all TILs in the
+[README.md](https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/README.md). That is
+error prone and has required me to use two different markdown list styles.
+
+A better approach is to ask `git` how many posts it currently has under version
+control. I use a consistent directory structure where each TIL post is a
+markdown file that is nested within a single category directory.
+
+```bash
+❯ git ls-files -- */*.md
+ack/ack-bar.md
+ack/case-insensitive-search.md
+ack/list-available-file-types.md
+...
+```
+
+Using `git ls-files` has the added benefit of only listing files that are
+currently checked in to the project. So if I run this locally, it won't pick up
+a draft post that hasn't been committed yet.
+
+I can then pipe this to `wc -l` (count of all lines) to produce the count:
+
+```bash
+❯ git ls-files -- */*.md | wc -l | xargs
+1850
+```
+
+Note: the empty `xargs` is a trick to trim the whitespace padding that `wc`
+introduces.
+
+See `man git-ls-files` for more details.