Word count with grep

DiagonalArg · 02-13-2006, 11:53 AM

Hi.
I've got a text file with some data in it and I want to know how many times the letter 'x' occurs in it, my problem is that x occurs many times on one line so I can't use grep -c.
What's the best way to do this? I'm sure there must be a simple solution, but I can't seem to find it!
Thanks for your help.

Matir · 02-13-2006, 12:03 PM

Code:

cat file | tr -d -c "x" | wc -c

This uses tr to delete all non-x characters and wc to count the xs.

DiagonalArg · 02-13-2006, 12:14 PM

Thanks! I'm quite pleased to see it wasn't a really obvious solution that I'd missed.

Matir · 02-13-2006, 12:46 PM

Nope, not terribly obvious. But I do like my shell tricks.