OMBD#13: Find Out the Total Number of Lines on a Git Repository
A one-liner to count lines, words, and characters on any repo
Welcome to issue #13 of One Minute Better Developer, where you become a more successful software developer by reading short nuggets of knowledge, one minute at a time.
⏮️ 🔛 ⏭️
THE PROBLEM
Our engineering manager has asked us about the total number of lines on several repositories of the company. How can we find out that information?
A SOLUTION
We are going to use the command git ls-files and pipe its output towc using xargs .
- As a repository example, we are going to create a new project using superplate.
npx superplate-cli my-app2. Once created, we are going into the repo directory.
cd my-app3. Now we can run git ls-files to recursively see all the files versioned in the repo.
git ls-files# .babelrc
# .eslintignore
# .eslintrc
# .gitattributes
# ...
4. However we want to also see the number of lines on every file. We are going to pipe the output of git ls-files to wc using xargs .
git ls-files | xargs wc# 1 4 30 .babelrc
# 1 2 26 .eslintignore
# 25 37 600 .eslintrc
# 1 2 12 .gitattributes
# ...
# 25891 49458 1219057 total
Here we see:
- 1st column: number of lines in that file.
- 2nd column: number of words in that file.
- 3rd column: number of characters in that file.
And in the last row, information on the total of files.
So our repo has 25891 lines.
