Hi, I have a problem and was wondering whether anyone can help ?

I have a file with a list of words all on one line separated by a delimiter (colon/ and at the moment I jusr assign 10 (the number of words in the file) to a variable but I need to be able to do this at runtime so that a piece of code would automatically be able to find out how many words are in the file.

Can anyone help ?

I have the following so far but im lost

FILENAME=MyWords
NUMBEROFWORDS=`cat $FILENAME | cut -d : -f | wc -w`
echo "$MAXWORDS"

Now i would like to know how many words they are in that file (all the words are on one line separated by a comma delimiter).

Hi.

I think 'awk' is the weapon of choice here.should give you the number of words. 'NF' is the Number of Fields and the -F argument is the delimiter.

Dave

ilikejam's response was good. Three comments.

First, ilikejam's response can be shortened to

I think somewhere on the Internet there's a file containing 99 unnecessary uses of cat, and this would be one of them.

Second, your originally posed problem hinted in one place that the delimiter was colon, and in another place that it was comma. If it's really colon, then do this instead:

Third, in your original example, you placed the word count in NUMBEROFWORDS, but when you displayed the result, you displayed MAXWORDS instead

Hope this helps.

I tried the following and it comes up with an error

FILENAME=MYWORDS
NUMBEROFWORDS=`cat "$FILENAME" | awk -F ':' '(print NF)'`

Hi thanks for the reply, I tried the following and it comes up with an error:


FILENAME=MYWORDS
NUMBEROFWORDS=`awk -F ':' '(print NF)' $FILENAME`
echo "$NUMBEROFWORDS"



I also did the following but the answer keeps coming up as 1 even though I have 10 words separated by colons.


FILENAME=MYWORDS
NUMBEROFWORDS=`cat "$FILENAME" | awk -F ':' '{print NF}' | wc -w`
echo "$NUMBEROFWORDS"

I did the following and it worked:

FILENAME=MYWORDS

NUMBEROFWORDS=`awk -F ':' '{print NF}' $FILENAME`

Thank you VERY VERY much.

You don't need any external command:

Hi, would anybody know how to determine whether a character entered is a letter or not.

For example:

echo "please enter a letter"
read LETTER
if [ $LETTER != ???]

I dont know what to put in there.

Any help would be appreciated.

Use case, not if:

If you need to consider non-ASCII letters (e.g., with accents), use [[:alpha:]] instead of [A-Za-z].

Thank you thank you thank you Ive managed it but I foresee many problems so I will be back.

Thanks a lot to everyone.

Referring to post number 9 is they a way of using an IF statement rather than a case statement ?

if [ $LETTERCHECK = [A-Za-z] ]
then
else
PLAYER=`expr $PLAYER +1`
fi

But the above code does not work

All POSIX shells can do arithmetic without using an external command:

PLAYER=$(( $PLAYER + 1 ))

There is, but it uses non-standard syntax, [[ ... ]].

What's wrong with using case? It is efficient, and it is portable across all Bourne-type shells.

I used the following but it keeps stating a syntax error:


if [ $LETTERCHECK = [[A-Za-z]] ]
then
echo ""
else
PLAYER= $(($PLAYER+1))
fi

I need to use the IF statement as its part of a project using different case and if statements and for this part I must use an IF statement.

Thank you

That sounds like homework.
You should read the documentation for your shell.

Thank you very much, its not homework but like a side project for work.

Thanks