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Arne wrote:
echo "<CTL-V>" | wc -w
Sorry to pick nits, but this will almost certainly fail due to quotation marks (and other "special" characters that musts be "escaped") contained in the article. Might I suggest an alternative:
wc -w<ENTER><CTRL-V><CTRL-D>
(Note: This is for Unix/Linux systems, or Windows/Mac systems with a Unix compatibility layer such as Cygwin.)
No worries, escaping bugs are one of the most common errors out there. For example, both Salon.com and Blogger.com have a bug which will screw up your comment, by unescaping HTML entitities such as & when you preview your post! (The solution is to copy, preview, paste, and then post.)
And they are the underlying source of the so-called "Cross-Site Scripting" security holes. Even languages like C and C++ are vulnerable (through the printf family of routines).