Count the number of occurances of a word

[Simpson]

Hello,

I would like to count the number of occurances of 'foo' in a file.

If I grep for 'foo' I can wc to get the number of lines but some lines may have more than one occurance of 'foo'.

Thanks

[Hein van den Heuvel · Accepted solution]

I would PERL with the neat \b regular expression component for the word boundary.

Something like:

perl -ne '$hits += s/\bfoo\b/XXX/g }{ print qq($hits hits.\n)'


If you need to to this for many strings, then you can use shell substitutions, $ENV{} array entries or 'shift' to get the string values which is hard-coded as 'foo' in this example.

Change /g to /gi for case-insensitive matches.


hth,
Hein.

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

it is important to know, whether really a word or a string count is wanted.
Besides this,
grep -c foo filename
is a far better line-counter than
grep foo
mfG Peter

[Simpson]

Thanks

[Dennis Handly]

>but some lines may have more than one occurrence of 'foo'.

If you have to have this correct, you can grep -w for foo, then use tr to break up the output, then count the lines with foo:
grep -w foo | tr -s " " "\012" | grep -c foo

Note this assumes space delimited. If you have more punctuation chars, you would have to add that to tr(1).