How can I count the number of words in a directory recursively? - bash

Question

I'm trying to calculate the number of words written in a project. There are a few levels of folders and lots of text files within them.
Can anyone help me find out a quick way to do this?
bash or vim would be good!
Thanks

Answer 1

use find the scan the dir tree and wc will do the rest
$ find path -type f | xargs wc -w | tail -1
last line gives the totals.

Answer 2

tldr;
$ find . -type f -exec wc -w {} + | awk '/total/{print $1}' | paste -sd+ | bc
Explanation:
The find . -type f -exec wc -w {} + will run wc -w on all the files (recursively) contained by . (the current working directory). find will execute wc as few times as possible but as many times as is necessary to comply with ARG_MAX --- the system command length limit. When the quantity of files (and/or their constituent lengths) exceeds ARG_MAX, then find invokes wc -w more than once, giving multiple total lines:
$ find . -type f -exec wc -w {} + | awk '/total/{print $0}'
8264577 total
654892 total
1109527 total
149522 total
174922 total
181897 total
1229726 total
2305504 total
1196390 total
5509702 total
9886665 total
Isolate these partial sums by printing only the first whitespace-delimited field of each total line:
$ find . -type f -exec wc -w {} + | awk '/total/{print $1}'
8264577
654892
1109527
149522
174922
181897
1229726
2305504
1196390
5509702
9886665
paste the partial sums with a + delimiter to give an infix summation:
$ find . -type f -exec wc -w {} + | awk '/total/{print $1}' | paste -sd+
8264577+654892+1109527+149522+174922+181897+1229726+2305504+1196390+5509702+9886665
Evaluate the infix summation using bc, which supports both infix expressions and arbitrary precision:
$ find . -type f -exec wc -w {} + | awk '/total/{print $1}' | paste -sd+ | bc
30663324
References:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/argument-list-too-long-error-solution/
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/
https://linux.die.net/man/1/find
https://linux.die.net/man/1/wc
https://linux.die.net/man/1/awk
https://linux.die.net/man/1/paste
https://linux.die.net/man/1/bc

Answer 3

You could find and print all the content and pipe to wc:
find path -type f -exec cat {} \; -exec echo \; | wc -w
Note: the -exec echo \; is needed in case a file doesn't end with a newline character, in which case the last word of one file and the first word of the next will not be separated.
Or you could find and wc and use awk to aggregate the counts:
find . -type f -exec wc -w {} \; | awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }'

Answer 4

If there's one thing I've learned from all the bash questions on SO, it's that a filename with a space will mess you up. This script will work even if you have whitespace in the file names.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
shopt -s globstar
count=0
for f in **/*.txt
do
words=$(wc -w "$f" | awk '{print $1}')
count=$(($count + $words))
done
echo $count

Answer 5

Assuming you don't need to recursively count the words and that you want to include all the files in the current directory , you can use a simple approach such as:
wc -l *
10 000292_0
500 000297_0
510 total
If you want to count the words for only a specific extension in the current directory , you could try :
cat *.txt | wc -l