storylen ---------- author: Dino Morelli *about* storylen is a command-line utility that behaves very much like `wc -w`. That is to say, it counts words in a file. This program takes that count and reports what type of literary work it corresponds to. As in: short story, novella, novel, and so on. I read a lot of fiction and I've been actively trying to read as much of it as possible on PDAs or similar portable devices for almost ten years now. Over time, I've come to reject book formats that are encrypted or otherwise consumer-unfriendly. This has gotten to the stage where I'm most comfortable with books as plain text files. At this point I have an impressive library of literary works and I needed a way to quickly assess the size of a book when deciding what to grab. It got to be tedious trying to guess from the size in bytes reported by the filesystem. storylen is written in Haskell and uses the Data.ByteString library. It's known to work with GHC 6.6 Example of program output, showing how similar it is to wc: 174372 novel ArnasonEleanor-AWomanOfTheIronPeople_1991.txt 76626 novel BearGreg-Psychlone_1979.txt 6073 short story EllisonHarlan-IHaveNoMouth_1967.txt 60596 novel FantasyScienceFiction2007-02.txt 72324 novel HorneMarc-TokyoZero_2003.txt 9156 novellette KellyJamesPatrick-StandingInLineWithMisterJimmy_1991.txt 1062 flash fiction PoeEdgarAllen-Raven.txt 11616 novellette RickertM-JourneyIntoTheKingdom_2006.txt 14334 novellette RuschKristineKathryn-Echea_1998.txt 28990 novella StrossCharles-TheConcreteJungle_2004.txt From my brief research into the issue, I gathered there are arguments over how exactly to word-count literature. The typing criteria from the Wikipedia article: seemed sufficient for my needs in this regard. And, as mentioned above, this program is doing a literal word count of each file a-la `wc -w` *install* Build and install in the typical way for Cabalized software: $ runhaskell Setup.lhs configure $ runhaskell Setup.lhs build $ runhaskell Setup.lhs test $ runhaskell Setup.lhs install A Debian .deb package is available for this project at its home page: http://ui3.info/d/proj/storylen.html A Debian .deb package is available for this project at its home page: http://ui3.info/d/proj/storylen.html