There may be a more vi (or vim/vile/elvis/...) way to do it, but this come to mind. Save the current doc: :w and then run 'wc' in a subshell: :! wc -w name-of-your-file.txt and it should tell you what you want to know. Good luck, Troy >>> fish at slava.net 10/03/01 11:30AM >>> I know there is a way to tell how many words are in a text document, but I don't know what it is. Can someone let me know? Also, is there a way to do it from within vi? And lastly, I've been trying to get StarOffice installed for the last 2 months. Should I scrap it and try with this 6.0 beta or keep at it with whatever this is I have? And if I scrap it, do I just delete the files or is there some fancy way of doing it? I've gotten all kinds of interesting error messages and warnings; if you want to know particulars it'll have to wait til I'm done writing my paper that's due tomorrow... which is why the word count is more important to me right now. ;) Lorry _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list