Question

If i have a folder of text files, how can I get the average words per file using Bash commands?

I know that I can use wc -w to get words per file, but i’m unsure of how to get the total number of words across all files, and then divide that number by the number of text files

Answer 1

This recursively traverses the filesystem and counts all words and files. In the end it divides the total number of words by the number of files:

find . -type f -exec wc -w {} \; | awk '{numfiles=numfiles+1;total += $1} END{print total/numfiles}'