count (non-blank) lines-of-code in bash

Question

In Bash, how do I count the number of non-blank lines of code in a project?

Answer 1

There are many ways to do this, using common shell utilities.

My solution is:

grep -cve '^\s*$' 

This searches for lines in the do not match (-v) lines that match the pattern (-e) '^\s*$', which is the beginning of a line, followed by 0 or more whitespace characters, followed by the end of a line (ie. no content other then whitespace), and display a count of matching lines (-c) instead of the matching lines themselves.

An advantage of this method over methods that involve piping into wc, is that you can specify multiple files and get a separate count for each file:

$ grep -cve '^\s*$' *.hh

config.hh:36
exceptions.hh:48
layer.hh:52
main.hh:39