How can I count all the lines of code in a directory recursively?

Question

We've got a PHP application and want to count all the lines of code under a specific directory and its subdirectories.

We don't need to ignore comments, as we're just trying to get a rough idea.

wc -l *.php  

That command works great for a given directory, but it ignores subdirectories. I was thinking the following comment might work, but it is returning 74, which is definitely not the case...

find . -name '*.php' | wc -l 

What's the correct syntax to feed in all the files from a directory resursively?

Answer 1

Try:

find . -name '*.php' | xargs wc -l 

or (when file names include special characters such as spaces)

find . -name '*.php' | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | xargs  wc -l 

The SLOCCount tool may help as well.

It will give an accurate source lines of code count for whatever hierarchy you point it at, as well as some additional stats.

Sorted output:

find . -name '*.php' | xargs wc -l | sort -nr