Count number of lines in a git repository

Question

How would I count the total number of lines present in all the files in a git repository?

git ls-files gives me a list of files tracked by git.

I'm looking for a command to cat all those files. Something like

git ls-files | [cat all these files] | wc -l

Answer 1

From a Windows 11 terminal you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux:

wsl /bin/bash -c "git ls-files . | xargs wc -mwl"

Where . is the path to your Git repository

Output:

Lines count | Word count | Character count

Answer 2

Per AlDanial, the cloc maintainer, this is the proper way to use git ls-files with cloc to reduce any issues with filenames:

git ls-files | cloc --list-file -

Answer 3

xargs will let you cat all the files together before passing them to wc, like you asked:

git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l

But skipping the intermediate cat gives you more information and is probably better:

git ls-files | xargs wc -l

Answer 4

The answer by Carl Norum assumes there are no files with spaces, one of the characters of IFS with the others being tab and newline. The solution would be to terminate the line with a NULL byte.

 git ls-files -z | xargs -0 cat | wc -l

Answer 5

If you want to find the total number of non-empty lines, you could use AWK:

git ls-files | xargs cat | awk '/\S/{x++} END{print "Total number of non-empty lines:", x}'

This uses regex to count the lines containing a non-whitespace character.

Answer 6

If you want to get the number of lines from a certain author, try the following code:

git ls-files "*.java" | xargs -I{} git blame {} | grep ${your_name} | wc -l

Answer 7

Depending on whether or not you want to include binary files, there are two solutions.

1. git grep --cached -al '' | xargs -P 4 cat | wc -l

2. git grep --cached -Il '' | xargs -P 4 cat | wc -l
   

   "xargs -P 4" means it can read the files using four parallel processes. This can be really helpful if you are scanning very large repositories. Depending on capacity of the machine you may increase number of processes.

   -a, process binary files as text (Include Binary)
   -l '', show only filenames instead of matching lines (Scan only non empty files)
   -I, don't match patterns in binary files (Exclude Binary)
   --cached, search in index instead of in the work tree (Include uncommitted files)

Answer 8

Try:

find . -type f -name '*.*' -exec wc -l {} + 

on the directory/directories in question

Answer 9

git diff --stat 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904

This shows the differences from the empty tree to your current working tree. Which happens to count all lines in your current working tree.

To get the numbers in your current working tree, do this:

git diff --shortstat `git hash-object -t tree /dev/null`

It will give you a string like 1770 files changed, 166776 insertions(+).

Answer 10

This works as of cloc 1.68:

cloc --vcs=git

Answer 11

I use the following:

git grep ^ | wc -l

This searches all files versioned by git for the regex ^, which represents the beginning of a line, so this command gives the total number of lines!

Answer 12

If you want this count because you want to get an idea of the project’s scope, you may prefer the output of CLOC (“Count Lines of Code”), which gives you a breakdown of significant and insignificant lines of code by language.

cloc $(git ls-files)

(This line is equivalent to git ls-files | xargs cloc. It uses sh’s $() command substitution feature.)

Sample output:

      20 text files.
      20 unique files.                              
       6 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.62  T=0.22 s (62.5 files/s, 2771.2 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Javascript                       2             13            111            309
JSON                             3              0              0             58
HTML                             2              7             12             50
Handlebars                       2              0              0             37
CoffeeScript                     4              1              4             12
SASS                             1              1              1              5
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            14             22            128            471
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You will have to install CLOC first. You can probably install cloc with your package manager – for example, brew install cloc with Homebrew.

cloc $(git ls-files) is often an improvement over cloc .. For example, the above sample output with git ls-files reports 471 lines of code. For the same project, cloc . reports a whopping 456,279 lines (and takes six minutes to run), because it searches the dependencies in the Git-ignored node_modules folder.

Answer 13

: | git mktree | git diff --shortstat --stdin

Or:

git ls-tree @ | sed '1i\\' | git mktree --batch | xargs | git diff-tree --shortstat --stdin

Answer 14

This tool on github https://github.com/flosse/sloc can give the output in more descriptive way. It will Create stats of your source code:

• physical lines
• lines of code (source)
• lines with comments
• single-line comments
• lines with block comments
• lines mixed up with source and comments
• empty lines

Answer 15

I did this:

git ls-files | xargs file | grep "ASCII" | cut -d : -f 1 | xargs wc -l

this works if you count all text files in the repository as the files of interest. If some are considered documentation, etc, an exclusion filter can be added.

Answer 16

I was playing around with cmder (http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/) and I wanted to count the lines of html,css,java and javascript. While some of the answers above worked, or pattern in grep didn't - I found here (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/37313/how-do-i-grep-for-multiple-patterns) that I had to escape it

So this is what I use now:

git ls-files | grep "\(.html\|.css\|.js\|.java\)$" | xargs wc -l

Answer 17

The best solution, to me anyway, is buried in the comments of @ephemient's answer. I am just pulling it up here so that it doesn't go unnoticed. The credit for this should go to @FRoZeN (and @ephemient).

git diff --shortstat `git hash-object -t tree /dev/null`

returns the total of files and lines in the working directory of a repo, without any additional noise. As a bonus, only the source code is counted - binary files are excluded from the tally.

The command above works on Linux and OS X. The cross-platform version of it is

git diff --shortstat 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904

That works on Windows, too.

For the record, the options for excluding blank lines,

• -w/--ignore-all-space,
• -b/--ignore-space-change,
• --ignore-blank-lines,
• --ignore-space-at-eol

don't have any effect when used with --shortstat. Blank lines are counted.

Answer 18

I've encountered batching problems with git ls-files | xargs wc -l when dealing with large numbers of files, where the line counts will get chunked out into multiple total lines.

Taking a tip from question Why does the wc utility generate multiple lines with "total"?, I've found the following command to bypass the issue:

wc -l $(git ls-files)

Or if you want to only examine some files, e.g. code:

wc -l $(git ls-files | grep '.*\.cs')