Question

I am using the wc utility in a shell script that I run from Cygwin, and I noticed that there is more than one line with “total” in its output.

The following function is used to count the number of lines in my source files:

count_curdir_src() {
    find . '(' -name '*.vb' -o -name '*.cs' ')' \
        -a '!' -iname '*.Designer.*' -a '!' -iname '.svn' -print0 | \
    xargs -0 wc -l
}

But its output for a certain directory looks like this:

$ find . '(' -name '*.vb' -o -name '*.cs' ')' -a '!' -iname '*.Designer.*' -a '!' -iname '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l
     19 ./dirA/fileABC.cs
    640 ./dirA/subdir1/fileDEF.cs
    507 ./dirA/subdir1/fileGHI.cs
   2596 ./dirA/subdir1/fileJKL.cs
(...many others...)
     58 ./dirB/fileMNO.cs
     36 ./dirB/subdir1/filePQR.cs
 122200 total
  6022 ./dirB/subdir2/subsubdir/fileSTU.cs
    24 ./dirC/fileVWX.cs
(...)
    36 ./dirZ/Properties/AssemblyInfo.cs
    88 ./dirZ/fileYZ.cs
 25236 total

It looks like wc resets somewhere in the process. It cannot be caused by space characters in filenames or directory names, because I use the -print0 option. And it only happens when I run it on my largest source tree.

So, is this a bug in wc, or in Cygwin? Or something else? The wc manpage says:

Print newline, word, and byte counts
for each FILE, and a total line if
more than one FILE is specified.

It doesn’t mention anything about multiple total lines (intermediate total counts or something), so who’s to blame here?

Answer 1

You’re calling wc multiple times – once for each “batch” of input arguments provided by xargs. You’re getting one total per batch.

One alternative is to use a temporary file and the --files0-from option for wc:

$ find . '(' -name '*.vb' -o -name '*.cs' ')' -a '!' -iname '*.Designer.*' -a 
    '!' -iname   '.svn' -print0 > files

$ wc --files0-from files