Hi,

I was given a question like this:

Write a program which reads a set of arguments from the standard input. Note
that there is no limit for the number of arguments. The first argument is the file
name and the other arguments are searched in the given file. For each argument, it displays the lines of the file which include the argument and it displays the number of times the argument exists in the file. This process is repated for the other arguments. You need to consider error messages for the case of non-existing file, non-existing argument(s) and missing argument.

I store the parameters in an array and decided the process the file line by line. Using head and tail, I get each line, but I can't come to a conclusion that if the word has an occurrance in that line.

For example, our file is:

Yesterday I played basketball.
I love basketball.
Basketball is good.

And we take the first line "Yesterday I played basketball." Assuming that we are looking for word "basketball", how can I state that "basketball" exists in that line? (and how many times)

Regards,
ambitious

You might want to review the rules of these forums, and in particular

(6) Do not post classroom or homework problems.

No, I don't want the problem to be solved. I just want to find occurrances of a word in a variable.

Wouldn't that be the same as solving the problem? Anyways, you can use grep to solve the problem. Look up the man page for grep on your unix system.