Get the number of lines of code for a project Posted on February 25, 2014

If you want to get the total line count for a project, you can simply combine the find and wc commands. In the example below, we get the number of lines of code for all PHP, JavaScript and CSS files under a given directory:

find [directory] -name '*.php' -o -name '*.js' -o -name '*.css' | xargs wc -l

If you want a relative number, you can use git commands to see how many lines were changed between two commits:

git diff --stat [reference commit]

Although line count isn’t a straight measure of code quality, discovering you have cut a code base size in half without touching features is always a good feeling.