Piped shell \input

[Andreas Scherer]

Dear TeX hackers,

Do you see any chance to replace this working (!) example

    \newcount\countD \countD=0
    \ifpdftex \ifnum\pdfshellescape=1
      \countD=\input{|"countmodules \jobname.tex"} \fi\fi

(from pwebmactex in development: 
https://github.com/ascherer/web/blob/master/pwebmac.tex#L88 in 
conjunction with the shell script countmodules: 
https://github.com/ascherer/web/blob/master/countmodules)

with the desired compact version

    \newcount\countD \countD=0
    \ifpdftex \ifnum\pdfshellescape=1
      \countD=\input{|"grep \\\\:\\\\X \jobname.tex | wc -l"} \fi\fi

leaving out the external shell script?

Thanks in advance,
Andreas