Getting error "xargs unterminated quote" when tried to print the number of lines in terminal

Does one of your filenames have a quote in it? Try something like this:

find . "(" -name "*.m" -or -name "*.h" ")" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l

The -print0 argument tells find to use the NULL character to terminate each name that it prints out. The -0 argument tells xargs that its input tokens are NULL-terminated. This avoids issues with characters that otherwise would be treated as special, like quotes.

This can happen because you have a single quote in a filename somewhere...

i.e., -> '

To find the problem file, run the following in the terminal:

\find . | grep \' 

and it can also happen if you have an alias for xargs setup that's causing an issue. To test if this is the case, just run xargs with a \ in front of it, e.g.

\find . | \xargs ....

The "" simply means "run the command without any aliases"