Monday, November 22, 2021

Count Lines of Code

If you have written any utility which counts lines of code, then throw it away because I accidentally discovered someone has done the job ... properly! I've deleted my old scripts because they were really tricky to write and the numbers they produced could only be regarded as approximations. Parsing arbitrary file contents accurately is inherently difficult and I'm glad someone with more patience, expertise and time has done the job for me.

See ▸ Count Lines of Code on GitHub

Just download cloc.exe and put it in a folder with your other favourite utilities.

There are dozens of command line switches to control the behaviour. I originally excluded files with 'Generated' in the names and other patterns for files that are not human authored, but it turns out it wasn't necessary because it can somehow tell the difference between different types of generated files. For example, it conveniently produces separate result lines for 'C# Generated' and 'C# Designer'. I'm not sure if it's looking at the file name or special contents of the files, but I'll assume it knows what it's doing.

It's simple to use and it produces neat, concise and probably accurate statistics.

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