Git: count files in a repository

You, counting all of your lovely files.

When you want to count the number of files within a Git repository, it's generally best to use Git itself for the task because it will skip over any generated or downloaded files. Here is a command chain to use to count all committed files within the current directory:

$ git ls-files -z | tr -d -c '\0' | wc -c
6947

Run within your repository root to count the whole repository, or within a subdirectory to count files within that subdirectory.

A breakdown:

  1. git ls-files -z lists all files. It uses the -z option to separate file names with null bytes, rather than newlines.
  2. tr -d -c '\0' deletes all characters except null bytes, leaving one null byte per file.
  3. wc -c counts the incoming characters, one null byte per file, to produce a total.

Why use null byte separators?

Using null byte separators increases the accuracy of the count. By default, git ls-files separates filenames with newlines. Usually that is fine, but since filenames may contain newlines (usually by mistake), separating filenames with newlines could possibly overcount files.

The quicker-but-less accurate version using newline separators is:

$ git ls-files | wc -l
6947

In my sample repository, as in most, there are no filenames with newlines, so this command produces the same result as seen before.

Count particular file types

To count files matching a particular patterns, you can provide a pathspec to git ls-files. For example, to count Python files:

$ git ls-files '*.py' | wc -l
2853

Alternatively, to exclude a particular pattern, prefix it with :!. For example, to count all files except .po translation files:

$ git ls-files ':!*.po' | wc -l
5675

The pathspec syntax has a bunch of features, as covered in my Git book as well as the Git documentation.

Fin

May you have as many files as you need but no more,

—Adam

😸😸😸 Check out my new book on using GitHub effectively, Boost Your GitHub DX! 😸😸😸

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