Install ohcount with Homebrew, apt, MacPorts, zypper

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• ohcount

Project history

The project traces back to Ohloh, the open-source project directory and analytics site later associated with Black Duck and Open Hub. Its README says it was originally developed at Ohloh and used to generate the reports at www.openhub.net, which makes it part of the early package-statistics infrastructure rather than just a standalone `wc`-style utility.

The original GitHub source repository was created on 2008-06-09, and the Black Duck fork used by package managers was created on 2010-10-27. The Black Duck repository kept the Ohloh identity in its description while moving the maintained packaging-facing project under the Black Duck Software organization.

Adoption history

Ohcount's most important adoption story is Open Hub itself: the tool was used to generate Open Hub's source-code reports, giving it a role in public open-source metrics. It also reached mainstream Unix packaging through Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, MacPorts, and openSUSE-style distributions, but Homebrew analytics generated on 2026-07-01 showed a small niche user base: 49 installs over 365 days.

The package stayed interesting to distributors because it is not a single-language counter. The README describes a detector for primary language family, a parser for line-by-line breakdowns, support for multiple languages in one file, whole-directory counting, language-family file discovery, detailed source annotations, and Ruby bindings.

How it is used

Developers and auditors use `ohcount` to count individual files or entire directory trees, identify source files by language family, and produce detailed annotations of a file's lines. Its ability to split mixed files, such as HTML with CSS and JavaScript regions, made it more sophisticated than plain line counters.

Package builders care about its implementation details because the Homebrew formula depends on `libmagic`, `pcre2`, and `ragel`, and applies Debian patches for modern build and PCRE2 support. The README also documents Ruby 2.x test expectations, SWIG bindings, and an unsupported Python wrapper.

Why package nerds care

Ohcount is a package-nerd artifact because it helped produce package metadata about other projects. It sits in the same historical lane as SLOC counters and open-source forges: the tool is small, but the data it helped generate shaped how people compared projects by language mix and code size.

Its formula tells the story of aging infrastructure kept buildable through distro patches. The combination of Ragel-generated scanners, Ruby bindings, PCRE migration, and GPL-2.0-only licensing gives maintainers plenty of packaging surface area for a deceptively simple CLI.

Timeline

• 2008-06-09: the original `korsakov/ohcount` GitHub repository was created.
• 2010-10-27: Black Duck Software's GitHub fork was created.
• 2021-12-09: the README build notes recorded tested build requirements for Ubuntu, Fedora, and macOS.
• 2026-07-01: Homebrew's formula API reported stable version 4.0.0 and packaged executables under `ohcount`.

Related projects

• Ohcount is closely tied to Ohloh/Open Hub. It is also related to other source line counters such as `cloc`, but its distinctive lineage is its use inside an open-source analytics service rather than only as a local developer utility.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/blackducksoftware/ohcount
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/ohcount.json
• https://github.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount
• https://openhub.net/p/ohcount
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount/main/README.md