Count total number of lines in a project excluding certain folders or files

Question

Using the command:

wc -l + `find . -name \* -print`

You can get the total number of lines of all files inside a folder.

But imagine you have some folders (for example libraries), which you don't want to count their lines because you didn't write them.

So, how would you count the lines in a project excluding certain folders?

score 27 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 19 '15 at 19:58

cloc has always been a great friend whenever I need to count lines of src-code. Using 2.6.29 linux kernel as an example:

$ cloc .

   26667 text files.
      26357 unique files.
          2782 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.50  T=168.0 s (140.9 files/s, 58995.0 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                             11435        1072207        1141803        5487594
C/C++ Header                  10033         232559         368953        1256555
Assembly                       1021          35605          41375         223098
make                           1087           4802           5388          16542
Perl                             25           1431           1648           7444
yacc                              5            447            318           2962
Bourne Shell                     50            464           1232           2922
C++                               1            205             58           1496
lex                               5            222            246           1399
HTML                              2             58              0            378
NAnt scripts                      1             85              0            299
Python                            3             62             77            277
Bourne Again Shell                4             55             22            265
Lisp                              1             63              0            218
ASP                               1             33              0            136
awk                               2             14              7             98
sed                               1              0              3             29
XSLT                              1              0              1              7
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          23678        1348312        1561131        7001719
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered May 16 '11 at 11:25

5

With find, you can also "negate" matching conditions with !. For example, if I want to list all the .java files in a directory, excluding those containing Test:

find . -name "*.java" ! -name "*Test*"

Hope this helps!

Edit:

By the way, the -name predicate only filters file names. If you want to filter paths (so you can filter directories), use -path:

find . -path "*.java" ! -path "*Test*"

answered May 16 '11 at 11:25

PaoloVictor

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how do you exclude multiple folders? – rclai May 19 '15 at 12:45
@rclai, you could just append additional `-path` expressions like so `find . -name '*.java' ! -path '*folder1*' ! -path '*folder2*'` – JamieJag Mar 20 '19 at 12:37

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 16 '11 at 11:21

0

you could always exclude them by listing out the files using regular expressions, for example,

*.txt will include only txt files and so on...

answered May 16 '11 at 11:21

ConfusedAboutCPP

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3
8
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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 09 '22 at 19:28

I made an NPM package specifically for this usage, which allows you to call a CLI tool and providing the directory path and the folders/files to ignore

it goes like:

npm i -g @quasimodo147/countlines

to get the $ countlines command in your terminal

then you can do countlines . node_modules build dist

Count total number of lines in a project excluding certain folders or files

4 Answers4