This can get pretty pedantic. Where do you draw the line between what is the blog generator and the tools required to do it when counting the number of lines of code? One could easily argue in this case you might want to be counting the lines of code in pandoc, not this bash script.

That said, I do think this is the way to go, using a popular and generic tool (notably that you do not have to maintain) to accomplish a specific task. And more importantly, composing utilities together in a succinct and efficient way.

Also, if you used semicolons, or xargs with a pipe, you could make this one line :) newlines can be pretty arbitrary, I wonder if there's a better measurement for simplicity, like branches or statements/expressions.

damn, that's not a bad effort, I like it. But it does sort of feel like cheating ;)

Mine is about 140 lines of bash, and I don't /think/ i'm using anything that isn't part of coreutils.

In that case, here it is in one line, producing byte-for-byte identical output to the snippet above:

    pangeadoc -c style.css ./ -O ./_site

(pangeadoc, of course, is a fork of pandoc that when invoked as above behaves exactly the same as those "3 lines of Bash".)