Text Processing – How to Count Total Number of Words in a File

If you grep for the regular expression ^.{6}$ it will return lines with exactly six characters:

$ tr ' ' '\n' < Filename | grep '^.\{6\}$'
paresh
jayesh
hitesh

$ tr ' ' '\n' < Filename | grep -c '^.\{6\}$'
3

pr default page length for text file is 56. So you can do like this:

$ perl -MPOSIX=ceil -nle 'END{print ceil($./56)}' file

If you want to count many files, try:

$ perl -MPOSIX=ceil -nle '
    if (eof) {
        print ceil($./56);
        close ARGV;
    }
' file1 file2 file3