This post if a followup for the previous one, on how to count lines in text or in a in a text file in Javascript. In this post I'm going to show how to count the lines of code in a project directory or any directory containing source code files of any type.
Using find, wc and xargs
In unix-linux based systems we can use find wc and xargs to count lines in files based on their extension.
find . -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l
Excluding directories:
find . -name '*.py' -not -path './exclude-dir/*' | xargs wc -l
Handling Spaces in Filenames
If the files or directories have spaces in their names, it’s safer to use find ... -print0 with xargs -0 to handle these names correctly.
find . -name '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l
-
find . -name '*.py' -print0: This finds all files ending with .py starting from the current directory (.). It prints the list of found files with each filename followed by a null character (\0) instead of a newline. This null character handling allows for filenames with special characters (including spaces) to be processed correctly by xargs. -
xargs -0 wc -l: The -0 option tells xargs to expect null-terminated strings as input (matching the output of find ... -print0). xargs passes the filenames to wc -l, which counts the lines in each file. The output is a list of line counts followed by the corresponding filename.
Counting Lines for Multiple File Types
find . \( -name '*.py' -o -name '*.js' \) -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l
Summing Total Lines
find . -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l | tail -n 1
Using awk to "accumulate" line count
find . -name '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l | awk '{total += $1} END {print total}'
awk '{total += $1} END {print total}': This awk script sums up the line counts. It reads the line counts (which are the first whitespace-delimited field $1 in the wc -l output) and accumulates them in the total variable. After processing all input lines, the END block prints the total sum of lines.
Using cloc(Count Lines of Code)
cloc (Count Lines of Code) is a specialized command line tool that not only counts lines of text, but also distinguishes between code, comments, and blank lines across multiple programming languages.
cloc .
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.82 T=2.12 s (1500.2 files/s, 240327.6 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JavaScript 2257 39250 72045 199230
JSON 229 9 0 39756
Markdown 308 13894 2 39106
CSS 21 2721 151 36892
Python 49 4343 7763 21745
C/C++ Header 10 1465 916 8019
Sass 88 1339 1297 6797
TypeScript 110 451 1794 2616
C++ 6 392 99 1840
Handlebars 36 424 81 1184
HTML 5 5 0 692
YAML 33 37 34 567
SVG 1 0 101 500
Lisp 2 42 38 258
C# 1 55 9 186
XML 5 0 0 72
SQL 2 11 16 66
make 5 25 4 60
Bourne Shell 3 4 6 26
Nix 1 1 0 19
DOS Batch 2 1 0 6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 3174 64469 84356 359637
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advanced Options
Filter by Specific Languages:
cloc --include-lang=Python,JavaScript .
3843 text files.
3510 unique files.
1553 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.82 T=1.33 s (1734.4 files/s, 259007.6 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JavaScript 2257 39250 72045 199230
Python 49 4343 7763 21745
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 2306 43593 79808 220975
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exclude Directories:
cloc --exclude-dir=node_modules .
131 text files.
117 unique files.
49 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.82 T=0.14 s (673.5 files/s, 480769.4 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CSS 18 2707 145 36722
JavaScript 29 4703 1679 13994
JSON 4 0 0 3862
Handlebars 36 424 81 1184
SQL 2 11 16 66
Markdown 3 20 0 63
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 92 7865 1921 55891
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you liked this post, give a thumb up and check my other post on how to count the number lines in a text or text files in javascript, or use my online tool to count lines in a text.
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