🧠 Second Brain

Counting Words written in Markdown

Last updated Feb 9, 2024

To document the progress of my book writing, I created a little script that outputs words written over time.

The main counting is done with wc -w, as ChatGPT told me:

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find src -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -name '*.md' -exec cat {} \; | wc -w

Interesting is to count the words over time. As I have everything in git, I loop over git logs with this script words-history.sh:

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#!/bin/bash

last_count=0

# Iterate over each commit
git log --reverse --pretty=format:"%H %ad" --date=short | while read hash date; do
    # Check out the commit
    git checkout $hash &> /dev/null

    # Count the words in markdown files
    words=$(find src -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -name '*.md' -exec cat {} + | wc -w)
    
    # Compare with the last count and output only if different
    if [ "$words" -ne "$last_count" ]; then
        echo "$date,$words"
        last_count=$words
    fi
done

# Check out the original branch
git checkout main

Now I can run below in my Makefile:

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./words-history.sh > stats/stats-words.csv

With Rill Developer, I imported and created CSV and made a dashboard with

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rill init
rill start

Simple is beauty.

Origin:
References: Markdown
Created 2023-11-09

🧠 Second Brain

Counting Words written in Markdown

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