Counting words

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
Is there a way to count the no. of words in all files in directory. All are text files.I use wc -w but somehow i am not getting the rite answer.
Is there an alternative.
Thanks in advance

2

Hi,

Not sure what you mean by "not getting the rite answer for wc -w". Well, since you want the word count of all files in the dir, I would try the below code -

cd YOURDIR
ls -1 > /tmp/files

while read files
do

   COUNT=`wc -w $files`
   echo $COUNT

   #you can do it even without using a variable

done < /tmp/files 
rm /tmp/files
3

What is the output of

wc -w *

and why is it not what you expected?

4

Hi
I got the problem. That's because my code is ignoring the sub directories. Thanks all for your help

5

you mean like this? Or do you want the grand total as well?

find -type f -exec wc -w {} \;
6

I need the grand total as well

7

Like this then?

find -type f -exec wc -w {} \;|awk '{tot+=$1}1;END{print tot" total"}'
8

Perfect that worked like a charm. Also is there a way to suppress the output of the awk and just display the grand total. The output just looks clumsy

9

Sure:

find -type f -exec wc -w {} \;|awk '{tot+=$1};END{print tot}'
10 
find  . -type f -exec wc -w {} \; | nawk '{a+=$1} ; END{print a;}'