As other people have stated wc -l is the easy way to go. But, if you want "lines" of code as in actual code statements, well, that gets a little more rough.

Parsing out comments in C/C++ is not trivial. Page 293 of Mastering Regular Expressions, 1st Edition gives a regex that will remove multiline C comments ( /* */ style), but like I said, it is non-trivial.

Furthermore, statements, themselves, could span multiple lines; thus, making a line count of non-comment lines be not indicative of how many statements of code are in a file.

if( foo ) i = 1; // just one statement

if( foo )
    i = 1; // still just one statement

if( foo )
{
    i = 1; // still just one
}

if
    (
        foo
    )
{
    i
        =
             1;  // 1 statement
}
[download]

So, I doubt it would be worth the effort to try and define statements of C/C++ code and count them. I would stick to wc -l.

Jeremy

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.