Here’s a quick shell script to get the number of posts in each category for an Octopress blog, just cat your source/_posts folder through the following one-liner:

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sed -n '/^---/,/^---/p' |\
grep '^- ' |\
sort |\
uniq -s 2 -c - |\
sort -n

Here’s what each line does:

1. extracts the Yaml front-matter from each file;
2. extracts each top-level list entry, this assumes that the only top-level list is the category list, which is the default for Octopress posts;
3. sort the lines;
4. collapse identical lines, prepending a count of the number of lines collapsed; and finally
5. sort numerically.

Maybe this will be useful to somebody out there…

Update: I’ve written a version that’s integrated with rake as well.