Are you working on a project and need to submit your progress, statistics or perhaps you need to calculate a value of your code? cloc is a powerful tool that allows you to count all lines of your code, exclude comment lines and white space and even sort it by programming language.

cloc is available for all major Linux distributions. To install cloc on your system simply install cloc package from system's package repository:

DEBIAN/UBUNTU:
# apt-get install cloc
FEDORA/REDHAT/CENTOS
# yum install cloc

cloc work on per file or per directory basis. To count the lines of the code simply point cloc to a directory or file. Let's create my_project directory with single bash script:

$ mkdir my_project
$ cat my_project/bash.sh 
#!/bin/bash

echo "hello world"

Let cloc to count the lines of our code:

$ cloc my_project/bash.sh 
       1 text file.
       1 unique file.                              
       0 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=0.00 s (262.8 files/s, 788.4 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bourne Shell                     1              1              0              2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's add another file by this time with perl code and count the line of code by pointing it to the entire directory rather then just a single file:

$ cat my_project/perl.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

print "hello world\n"
$ ls my_project/
bash.sh  perl.pl
$ cloc my_project/
       2 text files.
       2 unique files.                              
       0 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=0.01 s (287.8 files/s, 863.4 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perl                             1              1              0              2
Bourne Shell                     1              1              0              2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                             2              2              0              4
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the next example we will print results for each file separately on each line. This can be done by the use of --by-file option:

$ cloc --by-file my_project/
       2 text files.
       2 unique files.                              
       0 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=0.01 s (149.5 files/s, 448.6 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
File                              blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my_project/perl.pl                    1              0              2
my_project/bash.sh                    1              0              2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                                  2              0              4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

cloc can obtain count of all code lines also from a compressed file. In the next example we count code lines of entire joomla project, provided the we have already downloaded its zipped source code:

$ cloc /tmp/Joomla_3.3.1-Stable-Full_Package.zip

Count lines of currently running kernel's source code ( redhat/fedora ):

$ cloc /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`

For more information and options see cloc manual page man cloc