Skip to main content

grep Word Count Command

How do I count words using grep command under Linux / Unix like operating systems?

You can pass the -c option to grep command to suppress normal output and display a count of matching lines for each input file. The syntax is follows:
grep -c "string" file
In this example, search for a word called ‘var’ and display a count of matching lines:

grep -c 'var' /etc/passwd

You can pass the -v option to count non-matching lines:

grep -v 'var' /etc/passwd
However, this will not count words. To count exact matched words, enter:

grep -o -w 'word' /path/to/file/ | wc -w
The grep -o command will only display matched words and the wc -c command will display the word counts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Files creation

In LINUX files can be created by using any of the three methods given below:        1.  Cat command (cat - CONCATENATION)        2. Touch command        3. Vi editor 1. cat command: cat stands for CONCATENATE. This is the basic command when we start learning LINUX/UNIX, as the name suggest it is used to create new file, concatenate files and display the content of the files on the standard output.     Different examples of cat command which will be useful for the beginners. 1. Creating new file 2. View the contents of the file 3. View the contents of  multiple files 4. Display the output of a file using page wise 5. cat command without filename arguments 6. Display the content of a file with line numbers 7. Copy the contents of a one file to another file 8. Appending the contents of one file to another file 9. Redirecting the output of multiple files into a single file. 10. Getting input using standard input operator 11. Storing the output of multiple files into