File Analysis Commands

The first phase of our CLI journey involves building file analysis tools. We wanted simple commands that could instantly tell us the size of a text file, beautifully formatted in the terminal.

Count Words

The count-word command reads a file and returns the exact number of words inside it.

Usage

somethingzz count-word <filepath>

Example:

somethingzz count-word package.json

Output in terminal:

found 25 words in this file.

How it Works

Under the hood, we use Node’s fs (File System) module to read the file synchronously. Then, we use a Regular Expression split(/\s+/) to split the entire text by spaces and newlines, giving us an array of words!

Handling Errors Gracefully

If you provide a file path that doesn’t exist, Node.js normally crashes with an ugly error trace. We wrapped our logic in a try...catch block to intercept the error and instead print a beautiful, minimal red warning message using chalk.

---

Count Lines

Similar to counting words, the count-lines command returns the number of lines in a file.

Usage

somethingzz count-lines <filepath>

Example:

somethingzz count-lines src/index.ts

Output in terminal:

found 132 lines in this file.

How it Works

The logic is almost identical to counting words, except instead of splitting by whitespace, we split the text specifically by the newline character \n. The length of the resulting array is exactly the number of lines!