count-all-files-of-specific-type-tracked-by-git.md

Count All Files Of Specific Type Tracked By Git

I want to get a count of all the markdown files in my TIL repo. Since all the files I care about are tracked by git, I can use git ls-files to get a listing of all files. That command on its own lists all files tracked by your git repository. Though there are many other flags we can apply, that will do for my purposes.

By giving git ls-files a pattern to match against, I can turn up just, for instance, markdown files (*.md). I can pipe that to wc -l to get a count rather than exploding my terminal with a list of file names.

❯ git ls-files '*.md' | wc -l
    1503

That command includes README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md, but really I only want to count the markdown files that constitute a TIL. Those all happen to be nested under a single directory. So I can tweak the glob pattern like so:

❯ git ls-files '*/*.md' | wc -l
    1501

See man git-ls-files for more details.