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!!!