man/cline.1

.TH cline 1 "2026-07-05" "cline 1.6.0" "cline Manual"
.SH NAME
cline \- count line terminator characters in files
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B cline
.RI [ Options ]
.RI [ Directories... ]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B cline
counts the line terminator characters
.RB ( \en )
within all files in the specified directories.

If no directory is specified,
.B cline
scans the current directory.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.BI \-b " level"
Set the binary file heuristics level. The default is
.BR medium .
Valid levels are:
.BR ignore ,
.BR low ,
.BR medium ,
and
.BR high .
The heuristics use the ratio of non-printable characters after seeing
enough printable characters in the file (see
.MR isprint 3 ).
The higher the detection level, the
more printable characters the algorithm wants to see before making a decision.

Note that some Unicode files with a high ratio of non-printable
characters from the perspective of
.MR isprint 3 ,
might be misdetected by this algorithm as binary files.
.TP
.B \-c
Count non-whitespace characters instead of lines.
.TP
.B \-d
Report only directory sums.
.TP
.BI \-D " path"
Exclude the directory at the specified
.IR path .
A path can be relative or absolute but must always contain at least one path
separator. For example, if you want to exclude the top-level
.IR target
directory in a project of yours, use
.BI \-D " ./target"
to specify a path relative to your current directory. If you just write
.BI \-D " target"
you would exclude
.IR all
directories with that name in an recursive search with the
.BR -r
option.
This option may be used multiple times.
.TP
.BI \-D " name"
Exclude all directories with the given
.IR name .
This option may be used multiple times.
.TP
.BI \-E " pattern"
Exclude any line matching the regular expression
.IR pattern .
This option may be used multiple times.
.TP
.BI \-e " start end"
Exclude lines between the regular expressions
.I start
and
.IR end .
The first and the last line are only excluded when they completely match the
.IR start " or " end
pattern, respectively.
Similarly, when used with the
.BR \-c
option, characters within a line before
.IR start
matches and after
.IR end
matches are still counted.
This option may be used multiple times.
.TP
.BR \-h ", " \-\-help
Print help text and exit.
.TP
.B \-i
Print individual sums per file extension.
This option cannot be used together with
.BR \-V .
.TP
.B \-m
Print information about matching files only.
.TP
.BI \-s " suffixes"
Only count files with these suffixes.
Suffixes are separated by commas.
.TP
.BI \-S " suffixes"
Count any file except those with these suffixes.
Suffixes are separated by commas.
.TP
.BR \-r ", " \-R
Scan subdirectories recursively.
.TP
.BR \-v ", " \-\-version
Print version information.
.TP
.B \-V
Turn verbose output off and print the result only.
.SH SHORTCUTS
.TP
.B \-\-exclude\-cstyle\-comments
Equivalent to:
.BR "\-E '\es*//'" " " "\-e '\es*/\e*' '\e*/\es*'"
.TP
.B \-\-exclude\-blank\-lines
Equivalent to:
.BR "\-E '^\es*$'"
.SH EXAMPLES
.TP
.B cline \-rms .c,.h \-\-exclude\-cstyle\-comments
Recursively count matching
.I .c
and
.I .h
files, print matching files only, and exclude C-style comments.
.TP
.B cline \-Vc src
Print only the total number of non-whitespace characters in
.IR src .
.TP
.B cline \-rms .rs \-D ./target
Recursively count matching Rust source files starting with the current
directory, but skip the target directory. Print only matching files.
.TP
.B cline \-rb high -d -D .git
Recursively count all non-binary files with a high binary file detection
heuristic. Report only sums per directory and skip all directories with the
name
.IR .git .
.SH SEE ALSO
.UR https://uap-core.de/man/cline.html
https://uap-core.de/man/cline.html
.UE

.UR https://uap-core.de/hg/cline
https://uap-core.de/hg/cline
.UE

.UR https://sourceforge.net/projects/cline/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cline/
.UE
.SH AUTHOR
Copyright 2018 Mike Becker.