Find the Number of Lines in a Git Repository

Want to figure out how many lines of code are in your Git repository? I’ve had an alias in my .bashrc file for ages that does just that.

git ls-files | xargs wc -l

It uses git ls-files to generate a list of files, which it then passes it to the wc command, which generates word and character count statistics (the “l” flag makes it count lines).

Obviously the line is a bit of a mouthful (handful?). So you can create an easier alias, like “gitlines” and put it in your .bashrc file.

alias gitlines="git ls-files | xargs wc -l"