Count number of lines in a git repository

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.

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(+).

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