Programming Comments - Lines of code

Summary

Curious to know the size of a project, I was looking for a quick tool to count lines of code. Of the few projects I found, CLOC is what I recommend.

CLOC

The project is hosted on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloc/. It has been around since at least 2006. Latest version is 1.64 from just a few days ago, so it is still active. On Ubuntu 15.04, I installed v1.60 with sudo apt-get install cloc.

Usage

Run man cloc for a list of all the command-line parameters. Only 2 parameters I needed to use were:

--skip-uniqueness to ensure that several similar CMake files are considered unique and counted independently.
--exclude-dir=build to ensure that the build directory is completely ignored.

For example, if I wanted to get a summary of a project called "ABC":

cd projects/ABC/
cloc --skip-uniqueness --exclude-dir=build .
	

Report

Note that blank lines, comments, and source code are split into different columns. Depending on what you plan on doing with the statistics, you may want to combine some of those numbers together. Here is an example of the report created by cloc:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++                             131           4667           1363          22881
C/C++ Header                    129           1593           1369           3877
SQL                              29            229            208           1604
CMake                            45            146            134            381
Bourne Again Shell                2             24              9             44
DOS Batch                         2             16              2             30
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            338           6675           3085          28817
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	

So in this example, comments + code is 31902 lines. Then another 6675 blank lines for a total of 38577 lines across 338 files.