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Asked: 2024-11-26T05:09:07+00:00

How to count lines of code

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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
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Excluding directories: 

find . -name '*.py' -not -path './exclude-dir/*' | xargs wc -l
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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
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  • 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 () 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
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Summing Total Lines 

find . -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l | tail -n 1
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Using awk to “accumulate” line count 

find . -name '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l | awk '{total += $1} END {print total}'
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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 .
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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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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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