How many LaTeX classes and packages are there (say, on CTAN)?

Question

Well, the question is pretty self-explanatory. (I'm writing a short tutorial on LaTeX, and wanted some trivia;)).

Answer 1

TeX Live

TeX Live 2012 (2012-09-19)

$ egrep -c '\.sty$' ls-R
3381
$ egrep -c '\.cls$' ls-R
448
$ egrep -c '\.(sty|cls)$' texmf-dist/ls-R
3829

Different method:

$ find texmf-dist/tex/latex \( -name \*.sty -or -name \*.cls \) |wc
3148
$ find texmf-dist/tex/generic \( -name \*.sty -or -name \*.cls \) |wc
191
$ find texmf-dist/tex \( -name \*.sty -or -name \*.cls \) |wc
3500

But:

• False positives: .sty/.cls files that are not LaTeX packages or classes.
• There are packages that divide their work on smaller units (modules in tikz, …) that are formally LaTeX packages.
• TeX Live only contains a subset of free packages and classes.

TeX Catalogue

2012-09-19

$ find catalogue/entries/ -exec grep -l '/macros/latex' {} \; |wc
2154

But:

• Not all package in CTAN are in the Catalogue.
• There are packages outside CTAN:macros/latex/ (e.g. pgf) or packages that can be used in different formats.
• One Catalogue entry might contain several packages and classes.
• False positives: Driver files and other stuff (e.g. pdftex-def).

Answer 2

On a full MiKTeX installation:

$ find . | grep '\.sty' | wc -l
3498
$ find . | grep '\.cls' | wc -l
349

So about 3500 style files and about 350 class files.

Answer 3

At least the MiKTeX Package Manager has 2371 packages at the moment.