til/unix/get-word-count-for-all-files-in-git-repo.md

Get Word Count For All Files In Git Repo

As part of gathering numbers for A Decade of TILs, I wanted to get an word count of all the TIL markdown files I've committed to this project over its 10 year history. By using git ls-files with a pattern, I can get a list of all file names. Then with xargs I can pass that entire list to wc -w which gives a word count of each. The final line that wc -w outputs is a sum total of all the file word counts. Lastly, piping that through tail -n1 gives me just that last total count line.

$ git ls-files "*/**.md" | xargs wc -w | tail -n1
  206816 total

Since the tail -n1 obfuscates what the wc -w is doing, here is what that looks like before that final pipe.

$ git ls-files "*/**.md" | tail -n3 | xargs wc -w
     115 zsh/add-to-the-path-via-path-array.md
     190 zsh/link-a-scalar-to-an-array.md
     214 zsh/use-a-space-to-exclude-command-from-history.md
     519 total

I can even clean up the final output a bit more with awk:

$ git ls-files "*/**.md" | xargs wc -w | tail -n1 | awk '{print $1}'
206816