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

List And Count All Posts In TIL Repo

I want to be able to reliably list and count all posts in my TIL repo. I do this to check that the count in the README is accurate and in the workflow script that powers my GitHub Profile README. In the past, I've used pattern matching on the listing of all TILs in the 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.

❯ 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:

❯ 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.