Executing Word Counts with Bash

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

I’m in the process of starting a new writing project and I wanted to make the process of getting metrics easier so I rolled together this bash script:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Word Count:"
cat *.md | wc -w
echo "Page Count:"
cat *.md | wc -w | xargs -I{} expr {} / 250

If you’re looking to do this yourself then these commands all go into a single text file and a chmod +x command on the file makes it executable.

Here’s the output of this script:

./wordcount
Word Count:
    3827
Page Count:
15

The interesting tool here is expr which is a command line math tool. The 250 is a metric that I use for the number of words per printed page. I know in the modern era that a printed page is perhaps a bit of an anachronism but I find it very comforting to know that I wrote 15 pages today (which is what I actually turned out today).

What this does is:

take a collection of markdown files
count all the words in the collection of markdown files
count all the words in the markdown files and then feed that value into xargs which then feeds the value into expr and divides it by 250

Cross References:

Here are the places where I sourced some of these techniques:

[Executing word counts using cat and wc](cat work wc -w)
An example using using Xargs to feed into expr