The lightning-fast line counter for source projects.

linebolt — Blazing-Fast Line Counter for Source Projects

linebolt is a lightweight, high-performance command-line tool written in C that traverses directories and counts the total number of lines in source code files — fast. Originally designed for .c and .h files, it's engineered to scale to massive codebases like the Linux kernel, and flexible enough to support any extension (.py, .cpp, .yaml, etc.).

• 10× faster than cloc on large codebases
• Handles massive trees like the Linux kernel in under 10 seconds
• Accurate even for files without a trailing newline
• POSIX-compatible (Linux, macOS)

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Features

• Counts lines in all .c and .h files by default
• Non-recursive traversal using an internal stack (no malloc, no crashes)
• Skips irrelevant directories (.git, build, bin, etc.)
• Correctly counts files without final newline (unlike wc -l)
• Ignores empty files (zero-character files)
• Designed for Linux and other POSIX systems
• Ultra fast — C standard library only

Future roadmap:

• Custom extension filtering (--ext py,cpp)
• Blank/comment line exclusion
• JSON or CSV output mode
• Per-directory summaries

Build Instructions

You need a POSIX-compatible system (Linux, macOS) and GCC or Clang installed.

Compile

gcc -Wall -Wextra -o linebolt linebolt.c

Run

To count all .c and .h lines in the current directory:

./linebolt

Output includes line counts per file and a total at the end.

Example Output

   12 lines  ./include/util.h
    9 lines  ./src/helpers.c

=============================
Total lines: 44 

Behavior Differences Compared to cloc

Unlike cloc, linebolt counts all matching files — even if their contents are byte-for-byte identical.

This ensures line counts reflect what actually exists in the repository, rather than deduplicating identical files. As a result, linebolt may report slightly higher totals on projects that contain copied or duplicated files (e.g., vendored libraries, backups, or symlinks).

In testing on the Linux kernel, linebolt reported about 1% more lines than cloc, due to this intentional difference.

Directory Filtering

By default, linebolt skips common non-source folders:

• .git
• .svn
• bin
• build
• obj

You can customize this in should_ignore_dir() in the source code.

License

MIT License (see LICENSE)

Author: Zülfü Serhat Kük
Year: 2025

Contributions

Want to extend it to support other languages or formats? Want blazing-fast CSV or JSON output? Open a pull request or submit an issue.