Question

18

How do I list word count in multiple files?

rated 0 times [ 18] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 41310 / 3 Years ago, tue, august 24, 2021, 12:18:46

Say I need to find out how many words are in each file that has the word 'work' in its name.

I know that to find files with 'work' in the name, it would be ls work. And to figure out the number of words in a file it would be wc -w.

However I tried the following and it seems to be just displaying the number of files, not the number of words combined in all files (which I need):

ls work | wc -w

So say if there are 14 files that have 'work' in the name, it would display 14, not the number of words.

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answered 3 Years ago raacket · Accepted Answer

The syntax is wc -w [FILE]. If you don't use FILE but pipe in the output of ls work it will only count what it will read on stdin.

You need to pipe in the text itself:

cat *work* | wc -w

Alternative you could execute wc with find -exec. But be aware that this could show multiple "total" sums as find will call wc multiple times if there are lots of files.

find ./ -type f -name "*work*" -exec wc -w {} +