all i want to do is count the lines in each file

[snippsat]

if it's a strange encoding i don't care if this is accurate. this is operation on my edit log which has time of edit and a file path.

Can just ignore encoding errors,there is a parameter for this errors="ignore" or errors='replace'(will be ?).
So can do a version showing this can just copy my own code from this Thread and make a little change.

import os

def find_files(file_type, path):
    os.chdir(path)
    with os.scandir(path) as it:
        for entry in it:
            if entry.name.endswith(file_type) and entry.is_file():
                yield entry.name

def count_lines(files):
    for file in files:
        with open(file, encoding='utf-8', errors="ignore") as f:
            for line_nr, _ in enumerate(f, -1):
                pass
        yield file, line_nr + 1

if __name__ == '__main__':
    path = r'E:\div_code'
    file_type = '.txt'
    files = find_files(file_type, path)
    line_count = count_lines(files)
    print(list(line_count))

Output:
[('alice_in_wonderland.txt', 3599), ('test.txt', 1807), ('W2Testfile.txt', 1396)]

Compare with wc

λ wc -l *.txt
  1396 W2Testfile.txt
  3599 alice_in_wonderland.txt
  1807 test.txt
  6802 total