Ubuntu Manpage: cloc - Count, or compute differences of, lines of source code and comments.

NAME

       cloc - Count, or compute differences of, lines of source code and comments.

SYNOPSIS

         cloc [options] <FILE|DIR> ...

DESCRIPTION

       Count, or compute differences of, physical lines of source code in the given files (may be
       archives such as compressed tarballs or zip files, or git commit hashes or branch names)
       and/or recursively below the given directories.  It is written entirely in Perl, using
       only modules from the standard distribution.

OPTIONS

Input Options
To count standard input, use the special filename - and either --stdin-name=FILE to tell
cloc the name of the file being piped in, or --force-lang=LANG to apply the LANG counter
to all input.

--extract-with=CMD
This option is only needed if cloc is unable to figure out how to extract the contents
of the input file(s) by itself. Use CMD to extract binary archive files (e.g.:
.tar.gz, .zip, .Z). Use the literal '>FILE<' as a stand-in for the actual file(s) to
be extracted. For example, to count lines of code in the input files gcc-4.2.tar.gz
perl-5.8.8.tar.gz on Unix use:

--extract-with='gzip -dc >FILE< | tar xf -

or, if you have GNU tar:

--extract-with='tar zxf >FILE<'

and on Windows, use, for example:

--extract-with="\"c:\Program Files\WinZip\WinZip32.exe\" -e -o >FILE<

--list-file=FILE
Take the list of file and/or directory names to process from FILE, which has one
file/directory name per line. Only exact matches are counted; relative path names
will be resolved starting from the directory where cloc is invoked. Set FILE to - to
read file names from a STDIN pipe. See also --exclude-list-file, --config.

--diff-list-file=FILE
Take the pairs of file names to be diff'ed from FILE, whose format matches the output
of --diff-alignment. (Run with that option to see a sample.) The language identifier
at the end of each line is ignored. This enables --diff mode and by-passes file pair
alignment logic. See also --config.

--vcs=VCS
Invoke a system call to VCS to obtain a list of files to work on. If VCS is 'git',
then will invoke 'git ls-files' to get a file list and 'git submodule status' to get a
list of submodules whose contents will be ignored. See also --git which accepts git
commit hashes and branch names. If VCS is 'svn' then will invoke 'svn list -R'. The
primary benefit is that cloc will then skip files explicitly excluded by the
versioning tool in question, ie, those in .gitignore or have the svn:ignore property.
Alternatively VCS may be any system command that generates a list of files. Note:
cloc must be in a directory which can read the files as they are returned by VCS.
cloc will not download files from remote repositories. 'svn list -R' may refer to a
remote repository to obtain file names (and therefore may require authentication to
the remote repository), but the files themselves must be local. Setting VCS to 'auto'
selects between 'git' and 'svn' (or neither) depending on the presence of a .git or
.svn subdirectory below the directory where cloc is invoked.

--unicode
Check binary files to see if they contain Unicode expanded ASCII text. This causes
performance to drop noticeably.

Processing Options
--autoconf
Count .in files (as processed by GNU autoconf) of recognized languages. See also
--no-autogen.

--by-file
Report results for every source file encountered.

--by-file-by-lang
Report results for every source file encountered in addition to reporting by language.

--config FILE
Read command line switches from FILE instead of the default location of
~/.config/cloc/options.txt. The file should contain one switch, along with arguments
(if any), per line. Blank lines and lines beginning with '#' are skipped. Options
given on the command line take priority over entries read from the file. If a
directory is also given with any of these switches: --list-file, --exclude-list-file,
--read-lang-def, --force-lang-def, --diff-list-file and a config file exists in that
directory, it will take priority over ~/.config/cloc/options.txt.

--count-and-diff SET1 SET2
First perform direct code counts of source file(s) of SET1 and SET2 separately, then
perform a diff of these. Inputs may be pairs of files, directories, or archives. If
--out or --report-file is given, three output files will be created, one for each of
the two counts and one for the diff. See also --diff, --diff-alignment,
--diff-timeout, --ignore-case, --ignore-whitespace.

--diff SET1 SET2
Compute differences in code and comments between source file(s) of SET1 and SET2. The
inputs may be pairs of files, directories, or archives. Use --diff-alignment to
generate a list showing which file pairs where compared. See also --count-and-diff,
--diff-alignment, --diff-timeout, --ignore-case, --ignore-whitespace.

--diff-timeout N
Ignore files which take more than N seconds to process. Default is 10 seconds.
Setting N to 0 allows unlimited time. (Large files with many repeated lines can cause
Algorithm::Diff::sdiff() to take hours.)

--docstring-as-code
cloc considers docstrings to be comments, but this is not always correct as docstrings
represent regular strings when they appear on the right hand side of an assignment or
as function arguments. This switch forces docstrings to be counted as code.

--follow-links
[Unix only] Follow symbolic links to directories (sym links to files are always
followed).

--force-lang=LANG[,EXT]
Process all files that have a EXT extension with the counter for language LANG. For
example, to count all .f files with the Fortran 90 counter (which expects files to end
with .f90) instead of the default Fortran 77 counter, use:

--force-lang="Fortran 90",f

If EXT is omitted, every file will be counted with the LANG counter. This option can
be specified multiple times (but that is only useful when EXT is given each time). See
also --script-lang, --lang-no-ext.

--force-lang-def=FILE
Load language processing filters from FILE, then use these filters instead of the
built-in filters. Note: languages which map to the same file extension (for example:
MATLAB/Objective-C/MUMPS; Pascal/PHP; Lisp/OpenCL; Lisp/Julia; Perl/Prolog) will be
ignored as these require additional processing that is not expressed in language
definition files. Use --read-lang-def to define new language filters without
replacing built-in filters (see also --write-lang-def, --write-lang-def-incl-dup).

--git
Forces the inputs to be interpreted as git targets (commit hashes, branch names, et
cetera) if these are not first identified as file or directory names. This option
overrides the --vcs=git logic if this is given; in other words, --git gets its list of
files to work on directly from git using the hash or branch name rather than from 'git
ls-files'. This option can be used with --diff to perform line count diffs between
git commits, or between a git commit and a file, directory, or archive. Use
-v/--verbose to see the git system commands cloc issues.

--git-diff-rel
Same as --git --diff, or just --diff if the inputs are recognized as git targets.
Only files which have changed in either commit are compared.

--git-diff-all
Git diff strategy #2: compare all files in the repository between the two commits.

--ignore-whitespace
Ignore horizontal white space when comparing files with --diff. See also
--ignore-case.

--ignore-case
Ignore changes in case within file contents; consider upper- and lowercase letters
equivalent when comparing files with --diff. See also --ignore-whitespace.

--ignore-case-ext
Ignore case of file name extensions. This will cause problems counting some languages
(specifically, .c and .C are associated with C and C++; this switch would count .C
files as C rather than C++ on *nix operating systems). File name case insensitivity
is always true on Windows.

--lang-no-ext=LANG
Count files without extensions using the LANG counter. This option overrides internal
logic for files without extensions (where such files are checked against known
scripting languages by examining the first line for "#!"). See also --force-lang,
--script-lang.

--max-file-size=MB
Skip files larger than "MB" megabytes when traversing directories. By default,
"MB"=100. cloc's memory requirement is roughly twenty times larger than the largest
file so running with files larger than 100 MB on a computer with less than 2 GB of
memory will cause problems. Note: this check does not apply to files explicitly
passed as command line arguments.

--no-autogen[=list]
Ignore files generated by code-production systems such as GNU autoconf. To see a list
of these files (then exit), run with --no-autogen list See also --autoconf.

--no-recurse
Count files in the given directories without recursively descending below them.

--only-count-files
Only count files by language. Blank, comment, and code counts will be zero.

--original-dir
Only effective in combination with --strip-comments. Write the stripped files to the
same directory as the original files.

--read-binary-files
Process binary files in addition to text files. This is usually a bad idea and should
only be attempted with text files that have embedded binary data.

--read-lang-def=FILE
Load new language processing filters from FILE and merge them with those already known
to cloc. If FILE defines a language cloc already knows about, cloc's definition will
take precedence. Use --force-lang-def to over-ride cloc's definitions. (see also
--write-lang-def).

--script-lang=LANG,S
Process all files that invoke "S" as a "#!" scripting language with the counter for
language LANG. For example, files that begin with "#!/usr/local/bin/perl5.8.8" will be
counted with the Perl counter by using

--script-lang=Perl,perl5.8.8

The language name is case insensitive but the name of the script language executable,
"S", must have the right case. This option can be specified multiple times. See also
--force-lang.

--sdir=DIR
Use DIR as the scratch directory instead of letting File::Temp chose the location.
Files written to this location are not removed at the end of the run (as they are with
File::Temp).

--skip-leading=N[,ext]
Skip the first <N> lines of each file. If a
comma separated list of extensions is also given,
only skip lines from those file types. Example:

--skip-leading=10,cpp,h

will skip the first ten lines of *.cpp and *.h files. This is useful for ignoring
boilerplate text.

--skip-uniqueness
Skip the file uniqueness check. This will give a performance boost at the expense of
counting files with identical contents multiple times (if such duplicates exist).

--stat
Some file systems (AFS, CD-ROM, FAT, HPFS, SMB) do not have directory 'nlink' counts
that match the number of its subdirectories. Consequently cloc may undercount or
completely skip the contents of such file systems. This switch forces File::Find to
stat directories to obtain the correct count. File search speed will decrease. See
also --follow-links.

--stdin-name=FILE
Count lines streamed via STDIN as if they came from a file named FILE.

--strip-code=EXT
For each file processed, write to the current directory a version of the file which
has blank and code lines removed. The name of each stripped file is the original file
name with ".EXT" appended to it. It is written to the current directory unless
--original-dir is on.

--strip-comments=EXT
For each file processed, write to the current directory a version of the file which
has blank and commented lines removed (in-line comments persist). The name of each
stripped file is the original file name with ".EXT" appended to it. It is written to
the current directory unless --original-dir is on.

--strip-str-comments
Replace comment markers embedded in strings with 'xx'. This attempts to work around a
limitation in Regexp::Common::Comment where comment markers embedded in strings are
seen as actual comment markers and not strings, often resulting in a 'Complex regular
subexpression recursion limit' warning and incorrect counts. There are two
disadvantages to using this switch: 1/code count performance drops, and 2/code
generated with --strip-comments will contain different strings where ever embedded
comments are found.

--sum-reports
Input arguments are report files previously created with the --report-file option.
Makes a cumulative set of results containing the sum of data from the individual
report files.

--timeout=N
Ignore files which take more than <N> seconds to process at any of the language's
filter stages. The default maximum number of seconds spent on a filter stage is the
number of lines in the file divided by one thousand. Setting N to 0 allows unlimited
time. See also --diff-timeout.

--processes=NUM
[Available only on systems with a recent version of the Parallel::ForkManager module.
Not available on Windows.] Sets the maximum number of cores that cloc uses. The
default value of 0 disables multiprocessing.

--unix
Over-ride the operating system detection logic and run in UNIX mode. See also
--windows, --show-os.

--use-sloccount
If SLOCCount is installed, use its compiled executables c_count, java_count,
pascal_count, php_count, and xml_count instead of cloc's counters. SLOCCount's
compiled counters are substantially faster than cloc's and may give a performance
improvement when counting projects with large files. However, these cloc-specific
features will not be available: --diff, --count-and-diff, --strip-comments, --unicode.

--windows
Over-ride the operating system detection logic and run in Microsoft Windows mode. See
also --unix, --show-os.

Filter Options
--include-content=REGEX
Only count files containing text that matches the given regular expression.

--exclude-content=REGEX
Exclude files containing text that matches the given regular expression.

--exclude-dir=DIR1[,DIR2 ...]
Exclude the given comma separated directories from being scanned. For example:

--exclude-dir=.cache,test

will skip all files that match "/.cache/" or "/test/" as part of their path.
Directories named ".bzr", ".cvs", ".hg", ".git", and ".svn" are always excluded. This
option only works with individual directory names so including file path separators is
not allowed. Use --fullpath and --not-match-d=REGEX to supply a regex matching
multiple subdirectories.

--exclude-ext=EXT1[,EXT2 ...]
Do not count files having the given file name extensions.

--exclude-lang=L1[,L2[...]]
Exclude the given comma separated languages from being counted.

--exclude-list-file=FILE
Ignore files and/or directories whose names appear in FILE. FILE should have one file
name per line. Only exact matches are ignored; relative path names will be resolved
starting from the directory where cloc is invoked. See also --list-file, --config.

--fullpath
Modifies the behavior of --match-f or --not-match-f to include the file's path in the
regex, not just the file's basename. (This does not expand each file to include its
absolute path, instead it uses as much of the path as is passed in to cloc.)

--include-ext=<ext1[,ext2[...]]>
Count only languages having the given comma separated file extensions. Use --show-ext
to see the recognized extensions.

--include-lang=L1[,L2 ...]
Count only the given comma separated, case-insensitive languages L1, L2, L3, et
cetera.

--match-d=REGEX
Only count files in directories matching the Perl regex. For example

--match-d='/(src|include)/'

only counts files in directory paths containing "/src/" or "/include/".

--not-match-d=REGEX
Count all files except in directories matching the Perl regex. Only the trailing
directory name is compared, for example, when counting in "/usr/local/lib", only "lib"
is compared to the regex. Add --fullpath to compare parent directories to the regex.
Do not include file path separators at the beginning or end of the regex. This switch
may be repeated.

--match-f=REGEX
Only count files whose basenames match the Perl regex. For example this only counts
files at start with Widget or widget:

--match-f='^[Ww]idget'

Add --fullpath to include parent directories in the regex instead of just the
basename.

--not-match-f=REGEX
Count all files except those whose basenames match the Perl regex. Add --fullpath to
include parent directories in the regex instead of just the basename. This switch may
be repeated.

--skip-archive=REGEX
Ignore files that end with the given Perl regular expression. For example, if given

--skip-archive='(zip|tar(\.(gz|Z|bz2|xz|7z))?)'

the code will skip files that end with .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.Z, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz,
and .tar.7z.

--skip-win-hidden
On Windows, ignore hidden files.

Debug Options
--categorized=FILE
Save file sizes in bytes, identified languages and names of categorized files to FILE.

--counted=FILE
Save names of processed source files to FILE.

--diff-alignment=FILE
Write to FILE a list of files and file pairs showing which files were added, removed,
and/or compared during a run with --diff. This switch forces the --diff mode on.

--explain=LANG
Print the filters used to remove comments for language LANG and exit. In some cases
the filters refer to Perl subroutines rather than regular expressions. An examination
of the source code may be needed for further explanation.

--help
Print cloc's internal usage information and exit.

--found=FILE
Save names of every file found to FILE.

--ignored=FILE
Save names of ignored files and the reason they were ignored to FILE.

--print-filter-stages
Print to STDOUT processed source code before and after each filter is applied.

--show-ext[=EXT]
Print information about all known (or just the given) file extensions and exit.

--show-lang[=LANG]
Print information about all known (or just the given) languages and exit.

--show-os
Print the value of the operating system mode and exit. See also --unix, --windows.

-v[=N]
Turn on verbose with optional numeric value.

--verbose[=N]
Long form of -v.

--version
Print the version of this program and exit.

--write-lang-def=FILE
Writes to FILE the language processing filters then exits. Useful as a first step to
creating custom language definitions. Note: languages which map to the same file
extension will be excluded. See also --force-lang-def, --read-lang-def.

--write-lang-def-incl-dup=FILE
Same as --write-lang-def, but includes duplicated extensions. This generates a
problematic language definition file because cloc will refuse to use it until
duplicates are removed.

Output Options
--3 Print third-generation language output. (This option can cause report summation to
fail if some reports were produced with this option while others were produced without
it.)

--by-percent X
Instead of comment and blank line counts, show these values as percentages based on
the value of X in the denominator, where X is one of
c meaning lines of code
cm meaning lines of code + comments
cb meaning lines of code + blanks
cmb meaning lines of code + comments + blanks

For example, if using method 'c' and your code has twice as many lines of comments as
lines of code, the value in the comment column will be 200%. The code column remains
a line count.

--csv
Write the results as comma separated values.

--csv-delimiter=C
Use the character C as the delimiter for comma separated files instead of ,. This
switch forces --csv to be on.

--file-encoding=E
Write output files using the E encoding instead of the default ASCII (E = 'UTF-7').
Examples: 'UTF-16', 'euc-kr', 'iso-8859-16'. Known encodings can be printed with
perl -MEncode -e 'print join("\n", Encode->encodings(":all")), "\n"'

--fmt=N
Alternate text output format where N is a number from 1 to 5, or -1 to -5. 'total
lines' means the sum of code, comment, and blank lines. Negative values are the same
as the positive values but retain, instead of deleting, the intermediate JSON file
that is written. The JSON file name is randomly generated unless --out/--report-file
is given. The formats are:
1: by language (same as cloc default output)
2: by language with an extra column for total lines
3: by file with language
4: by file with a total lines column
5: by file with language and a total lines column

--hide-rate
Do not show line and file processing rates in the output header. This makes output
deterministic.

--json
Write the results in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

--md
Write the results as Markdown-formatted text.

--out=FILE
Synonym for --report-file=FILE.

--progress-rate=N
Show progress update after every N files are processed (default N=100). Set N to 0 to
suppress progress output; useful when redirecting output to STDOUT.

--quiet
Suppress all information messages except for the final report.

--report-file=FILE
Write the results to FILE instead of standard output.

--summary-cutoff=X:N
Aggregate to 'Other' results having X lines below N where X is one of
c meaning lines of code
f meaning files
m meaning lines of comments
cm meaning lines of code + comments Appending a percent sign to N changes the
calculation from straight count to percentage. Ignored with --diff or --by-file.

--sql=FILE
Write results as SQL CREATE and INSERT statements which can be read by a database
program such as SQLite. If FILE is -, output is sent to STDOUT.

--sql-append
Append SQL insert statements to the file specified by --sql and do not generate table
creation option.

--sql-project=NAME
Use name as the project identifier for the current run. Only valid with the --sql
option.

--sql-style=STYLE
Write SQL statements in the given style instead of the default SQLite format. Styles
include Oracle and Named_Columns.

--sum-one
For plain text reports, show the SUM: output line even if only one input file is
processed.

--xml
Write the results in XML.

--xsl[=FILE]
Reference FILE as an XSL stylesheet within the XML output. If FILE is not given,
writes a default stylesheet, cloc.xsl. This switch forces --xml to be on.

--yaml
Write the results in YAML.

EXAMPLES

       Count the lines of code in the Perl 5.10.0 compressed tar file on a UNIX-like operating
       system:

         cloc perl-5.10.0.tar.gz

       Count the changes in files, code, and comments between Python releases 2.6.6 and 2.7:

         cloc --diff Python-2.6.6.tar.bz  Python-2.7.tar.bz2

       To see how cloc aligns files for comparison between two code bases, use the
       --diff-alignment=FILE option.  Here the alignment information is written to "align.txt":

         cloc --diff-alignment=align.txt gcc-4.4.0.tar.bz2  gcc-4.5.0.tar.bz2

       Count file, code, and comment changes between two git commits:

         cloc --git --diff b409850824 HEAD

       Print the recognized languages:

         cloc --show-lang

       Remove comments from "foo.c" and save the result in "foo.c.nc" ("nc" is an arbitrary
       extension; used here to denote "no comments"):

         cloc --strip-comments=nc foo.c

       Additional examples can be found at <https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc>.

ENVIRONMENT

       None.

FILES

       None.

AUTHORS

       The cloc program was written by Al Danial <al.danial@gmail.com> and is Copyright (C)
       2006-2023 <al.danial@gmail.com>.

       The manual page was originally written by Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>.

       Both the code and documentation is released under the GNU GPL version 2 or (at your
       option) any later version. For more information about license, visit
       <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>.