Development Cycle

dd is one of those indispensable Unix / Linux utilities whether its cloning or wiping a drive or simply creating a bootable flash drive from an image file. The problem is operations like wiping a drive with the output from /dev/zero can take an extremely long time especially on larger hard drives. In situations like this it can be handy or somewhat soothing for the impatient to know how far through the requested action the process is.

Luckily its pretty simple to find out, simply open a new tab and execute:

pgrep -l ‘^dd$’

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Although the “lines of code” in a project is not the worlds most useful metric. Curiosity sometimes gets the better of us and after many days / weeks of typing you think “gee I wonder exactly how many lines of code are in that project?”.

Wonder no more! By embracing the power of the command line you can easily count the lines in every file recursively. Simply execute the following line in the directory of your project (changing .php to the file extension of the files you would like to count the line of):

find . -name ‘*.php’ | xargs wc -l

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