Hi all,
I need to count the number of lines in all the files under a directory (several levels deep). I am feeling extremely dumb, but I don't know how to do that. Needless to say, I am not a shell script wiz... Any advice?

thanks in advance!

Try this:

find /topleveldirectory/ -type f -exec wc -l {} \;

Hi,

How do I get the total number of lines because when I try this command it just lists them endlessly where I only want one number?

Cheers

wc -l `find /dir/name -type f`

this is an old thread.
beside exceeding shells argument limitations, you solution does not cater for files with white spaces.

find . -type f -print|while read FILENAME
do
      cat "${FILENAME}"
done | wc -l

Simple and fast:

find /topleveldirectory/ -type f -exec wc -l {} \; | awk '{total += $1} END{print total}'