Use find, wc, and sed to count lines

Question

I was trying to use sed to count all the lines based on a particular extension.

find -name \'*.m\' -exec wc -l {} \\; | sed ...

I was tryi

Answer 1

For big directories we should use:

find . -type f -name '*.m' -exec sed -n '$=' '{}' + 2>/dev/null | awk '{ total+=$1 }END{print total}' 

# alternative using awk twice
find . -type f -name '*.m' -exec awk 'END {print NR}' '{}' + 2>/dev/null | awk '{ total+=$1 }END{print total}' 

Answer 2

sed is not the proper tool for counting. Use awk instead:

find . -name '*.m' -exec awk '{print NR}' {} +

Using + instead of \; forces find to call awk every N files found (like with xargs).