lines

A tiny Rust CLI for counting lines in a file or across a directory tree.

What It Does

• Counts lines in a single file
• Counts total lines across a directory recursively
• Skips .git and target directories when scanning folders
• Treats files with NUL bytes as non-text during directory scans and counts them as 0
• Uses a small amount of parallelism for larger directory scans

Requirements

• Rust and Cargo installed

Build

cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be available at:

target/release/lines

Usage

lines [file-or-directory]

If you do not pass a path, lines counts the current working directory.

Examples

Count the current directory:

cargo run --release

Count a specific directory:

cargo run --release -- src

Count a single file:

cargo run --release -- src/main.rs

Run the built binary directly:

./target/release/lines .

Example Output

1234 total lines in /path/to/project
187 lines in src/main.rs

Notes

• Directory mode is recursive.
• Single-file mode counts the file directly.
• Passing more than one argument returns a usage error.

Test

cargo test