How can I count the occurrences of a string within a file?

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Leo Chan · Jul 19, 2011 · Viewed 124.7k times · Source

Just take this code as an example. Pretending it is an HTML/text file, if I would like to know the total number of times that echo appears, how can I do it using bash?

new_user()
{
    echo "Preparing to add a new user..."
    sleep 2
    adduser     # run the adduser program
}

echo "1. Add user"
echo "2. Exit"

echo "Enter your choice: "
read choice


case $choice in
    1) new_user     # call the new_user() function
       ;;
    *) exit
       ;;
esac

Answer

The number of string occurrences (not lines) can be obtained using grep with -o option and wc (word count):

$ echo "echo 1234 echo" | grep -o echo
echo
echo
$ echo "echo 1234 echo" | grep -o echo | wc -l
2

So the full solution for your problem would look like this:

$ grep -o "echo" FILE | wc -l

How can I count the occurrences of a string within a file?

Answer

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