counting number of lines inside a directory structure.

vl@d · 11-17-2006, 02:27 PM

I have a set of c,c++, text, and a couple of other files inside a directory structure. Some files have a tilde (~) at the end, such as main.cpp~, which are created by the editor to make backups of the original files.

How can I count the number of code lines inside my directoy structure, excluding the tilde files and a few others.

thanks

caps_phisto · 11-17-2006, 02:49 PM

First change directory to the directory you'd like to run this from. Then perform the following command:

Code:

ls | grep -vc [~]

That will give you a number and that is how many lines are in that directory that don't have a ~ anywhere in it. To filter out more simply add more symbols in between the brackets. However, if any of the symbols are anywhere in the name of the file, that file will be excluded from the count.

For example if you ran:

Code:

 ls | grep -vc [~a]

All of the file names that contained the "~" character would be omitted from the count, and all the files that contained the letter "a" in their name would also be omitted.

Hope that helps

haertig · 11-17-2006, 03:08 PM

Code:

find /path/to/the/directory -type f -regex ".*[c|cpp|h|txt]" -print | xargs wc -l

This will do all the files that end in "c" or "cpp" or "h" or "txt". Adjust the regular expressions as necessary. You'll get a line count for each file, and a grand total at the end of the listing.

[edit]
Oops. Fixed a very bad typo. I had left out the "xargs" part! That is definitely required if you want a count of the lines in these files. Without xargs, you'll get a count of the files, not the lines they contain. Sorry about that typo.
[/edit]

matthewg42 · 11-17-2006, 03:32 PM

Just a note on something I found out yesterday which I didn't previously know, ls has an option to hide backup files (those ending in ~):

Code:

ls -B

Having said that, find is probably better in this case because it's easier to exclude object files, library files etc, as haertig described.

It may be that there are so many files found that xargs invoked multiple instances of wc, and then your total will be split. Also, some files may contain spaces in which case wc will think one file is two filenames and fail to count them. Therefore, this might be a little more robust:

Code:

find /path/to/code/dir -type f -regex ".*[c|cpp|h]" -print0 |xargs -0 cat |wc -l

vl@d · 11-20-2006, 12:50 PM

That worked great, thanks guys.