In an effort to start tracking my daily word count, I wrote this script. It checks in a folder for changes to the word count of text files since it was last updated. I have the script update the word count nightly, using a cron job.

Get It

The script can be found on pastebin, or as a zipped Python file here.

Usage

In the first few lines of the script, two variables are set:

• default_path: Set this to the path to check for updates. The script recurses into sub-directories.
• default_threshold: This classifies what is deemed ‘recent’, and by default is within the last day (timedelta(day=1)). This is defined as a Python timedelta object, which is documented here. You can replace day=1 with other arguments, like day=2 or week=1. The script currently works with dates, not times, so things like hour=1 will not work properly.

Once configured, the current word count of recent files (within default_threshold), compared to any previous record (created using the update command), can be found by running wc.py with no arguments. A simple number-only output can be achieved by running wc.py raw.

The word count can be “updated” by running wc.py update. This makes a record of the word count of any recently modified files, in a file called .wordcount, in the default directory. It makes sense to set up a cron job or task to do this in line with the default_threshold value.

It is also important to note that the script will only perform word counts on text files (.txt). It theoretically supports any other plain-text files, but currently filters by file extension.

I hope this first version of the script is at the least a useful example of Python’s simpler operations, as well as Pickle, the module which allows objects to be written as binary files.

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