Unix commands: The best tool for the job
With Unix, there are always many ways to do a single thing, but sometimes one approach is just a lot better! Let's look at a couple examples of commands that are right for the job.
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The Best Tool For The Job
In your example you state:> If you need to count how many times a particular string
> appears in a file . . .
but actually neither of your examples answers the question
exactly as lines can contain multiple occurrences of the
same string. Your example only shows the number of lines
that contain the string, not the number of strings. This
is a much more complex problem. I have not found a simple
command to do this, but I have written a small script to
do so. It is not very elegant, but here it is:
---
#!/bin/ksh
integer count=0
echo $count
count=`grep -c "$1" "$2"`
cp $2 $2.$$
while
grep "$1" $2.$$ > /dev/null 2>&1
do
ed - $2.$$ <<-EOF
g/$1/s///
w
q
EOF
count=$count+`grep -c "$1" "$2.$$"`
done
rm $2.$$
echo $count
---
This works on my SUN Solaris 10 system.