Word count of multi-file Latex project

Today I learned a nice trick to get the total word count of a latex project with multiple files:

detex *.tex | wc -w

detex does a pretty decent job of extracting commands from a latex file, and wc, of course, gets a word count. What surprised me was that detex did the sensible thing when presented with multiple files and merged all the output together. Gotta love the "small tools" unix philosophy.