If you’ve ever wanted to quickly measure how much code you or your team have written in a Git repository, there’s a neat little command-line trick that can help — without the need for manually downloading ZIPs or scanning the entire project history. Enter: cloc-git.

The StackOverflow answer to “Can you get the number of lines of code from a GitHub repository?” shares a clever one-liner using cloc and Git:

git clone https://github.com/some/repo.git
cd repo
cloc .

Want to make this reusable? Wrap it into a script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
git clone --depth 1 "$1" temp-linecount-repo &&
  printf "('temp-linecount-repo' will be deleted automatically)\n\n\n" &&
  cloc temp-linecount-repo &&
  rm -rf temp-linecount-repo