This is a simple tool to calculate reads number and total base count in FASTQ file. Modified from http://lh3lh3.users.sourceforge.net/parsefastq.shtml. Compile: gcc -o kseq_fastq_base kseq_fastq_base.c -lz Usage: kseq_fastq_base [input.fq] FASTQ files could be gzipped! ^_^. The statistic results would be printed on STDOUT. It could deal with ~4M reads (1G base) in less than 40 seconds, ~50M reads (14G base) in less than 5 minutes!!!