Looping wc through multiple folders counting the words for each text file

Question

I have a structure where one folder contains many subfolders that each have some .txt documents in it. I'm looking for a way to find the average text lengths (in words). Therefore I want to count the words in each .txt file using wc.

I've tried so far: ls */*.txt | wc -w (which sadly outputs only a single number).

My other attempt was using for docs in /home/.../myfolder/*.txt do wc -w docs;

Which just cancels itself after some time.

Answer 1

You could make use of find command to execute wc recursively:

find -type f -name "*.txt" -exec wc -w {} \;

Alternatively, via recursive glob in bash:

shopt -s globstar
wc -w **/*.txt