PowerShell Calculated Properties Used to Count Lines of Code

I’ve completely committed myself to PowerShell in the last few months which means when I’ve got a problem that should be scripted I’ll stick to my guns and make it work with PowerShell.

I was trying to estimate some changes to some files in an existing Visual Studio .Net solution and turned to PowerShell for some statistics. My first question was easy, how many files with the extension aspx do I have:

    > ls *.aspx -recurse | measure

which gives a useful output of:

Count    : 42
Average  :
Sum      :
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property :

What I then wanted was a count of lines across all those files:

    ls *.aspx -Recurse 
        | % { $_ | Get-Content | Measure -Line } 
        | % lines 
        | measure -Sum

I’ve put some linebreaks in for readability but the trick here was to use % and $_ to pipe each file through Get-Content to make used of Measures line counting ability. Then I isolate the lines property with % lines and sum to get:

    Count    : 42
    Average  :
    Sum      : 3795
    Maximum  :
    Minimum  :
    Property :

The next and final step takes this script and turns it into one that counts and groups the number of lines of code across multiple file types. Here’s the code:

    ls *.aspx,*.ascx,*.cs -r 
      | select Extension, @{ 
        name="LineCount"; 
        expression = { $_ | get-content | measure -Line | % Lines }  
      } 
      | Group -Property Extension 
      | select Name, @{ 
        name="LineCount"; 
        expression = { $_.Group | Measure -Sum -Property LineCount | % Sum } 
      }

And the output:

    Name  LineCount
    ----  ---------
    .aspx      3795
    .ascx       262
    .cs       24034

The key break through for me to write this was the use of calculated properties which are added in two of the select commands and have the syntax of @{ name=""; expression={}. The first select simply returns an object, one for each file found by ls, with the file extension and the count of lines in that file. After the group command the output looks like this:

    Count Name                      Group
    ----- ----                      -----
       42 .aspx                     {@{Extension=.aspx; LineCount=107}, @{Extension=.aspx; LineCount=112}, @{Extension=.aspx; LineCount=114}...
       10 .ascx                     {@{Extension=.ascx; LineCount=3}, @{Extension=.ascx; LineCount=6}, @{Extension=.ascx; LineCount=18}, @{E...
      165 .cs                       {@{Extension=.cs; LineCount=75}, @{Extension=.cs; LineCount=23}

The purpose of the second select is to iterate through each group summing just the LineCount properties with a final % sum to isolate just the sum.

And before I finish, some of this was written with the help of Microsoft Reference which may well be used a lot more in the future :)