How to count total number of lines of found files?

Question

I'm running a find . -name pattern to find some files, and I'd like to elegantly get the total number of lines in these files.

How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

If your version of wc and find support the necessary options:

find . -name pattern -print0 | wc -l --files0-from=-

which will give you per-file counts as well as a total. If you want only the total:

find . -name pattern -print0 | wc -l --files0-from=- | tail -n 1

Another option for versions of find that support it:

find . -name pattern -exec cat {} + | wc -l 

Answer 2

Unfortunately the output of :

find . -iname "yourpattern" -exec cat '{}' \; |wc -l

inserts extra lines. In order to get a reliable line count you should do:

find . -name "yourpattern" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l

This way you handle spaces correctly, get a line count for each file, and the total line count, faster and in style!!!

Answer 3

Untested, but how about something like:

cat `find . -name "searchterm" -print` | wc -l

Answer 4

$ find . -name '*.txt' -exec cat '{}' \; | wc -l

Takes each file and cats it, then pipes all that through wc set to line counting mode.

Or, [untested] strange filename safe:

$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 cat | wc -l