On 2011-10-14, Kumar Appaiah <a.kumar@alumni.iitm.ac.in> wrote: > > How about: > pdftotext <pdffile>|wc -w curty@einstein:~/glimmer$ pdftotext doctorswife.pdf | wc -w 0 Oops. curty@einstein:~/glimmer$ pdftotext doctorswife.pdf - | wc -w 1415 I think you need the stdout hyphen; otherwise, with the file name argument missing, it just writes <pdffile.txt>.