from the desk of stinkpot

count matches on the command-line

October 15th, 2007 by Lawrence David

to count the number of times you match a substring in a larger text file, you can use the following shell one-liner:

>> sed “s/[sub_str]/[sub_str]\n/g” [text_file] | wc -l

Posted in Shell Scripting | 2 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

2 Responses to “count matches on the command-line”

1. on 23 Feb 2012 at 6:10 am   zoltanctoth

   Brilliant idea!

2. on 16 Jul 2012 at 6:39 am   Rob Stewart

   Why not just use grep -c ‘sub_str’ text_file?