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Is it possible to determine the number of times a particular word appears using grep
I tried the "-c" option but this returns the number of matching lines the particular word appears in
For example if I have a file with
some words and matchingWord and matchingWord
and then another matchingWord
running grep on this file for "matchingWord" with the "-c" option will only return 2 ...
note: this is the grep command line utility on a standard unix os
730
Using grep -c alone will count the number of lines that contain the matching word instead of the number of total matches. The -o option is what tells grep to output each match in a unique line and then wc -l tells wc to count the number of lines. This is how the total number of matching words is deduced.
To count the number of occurrences of a specific word in a text file, read the content of text file to a string and use String. count() function with the word passed as argument to the count() function.
To search multiple files with the grep command, insert the filenames you want to search, separated with a space character. The terminal prints the name of every file that contains the matching lines, and the actual lines that include the required string of characters. You can append as many filenames as needed.
grep -o string file will return all matching occurrences of string. You can then do grep -o string file | wc -l to get the count you're looking for.
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