Not easily. When your field separator is whitespace characters (the awk default), trying to match a single field that contains one of your field separators is always going to fail. Furthermore, this code will combine your desired patterns with surrounding non-space characters. For instance, with the following contents in file:

Code:

error open
open database
database fail
fail accepted
		if ($i ~ "(error|fail|panic|open database|accepted)")
accepted error
error, fail, panic, open database, accepted

the code:

Code:

gawk '{
	for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
		if ($i ~ "error|fail|panic|open database|accepted")
			a[$i]++
} END {
	for (i in a) {
		n++
		printf("%s=%s%s", i, a[i], (n < 4 ? ", " : "\n"))
	}
}' file

produces the output:

Code:

error=2, fail=2, fail,=1, error,=1
accepted.=1
accepted=2
panic,=1
"(error|fail|panic|open=1
database|accepted)")=1

Note that the 4 shown in red above controls how many patterns are shown on the 1st line of the output. If all of your patterns only appeared as complete fields (with no punctuation and no additional letter [such as errors or panics]), you would want that number to be the same as the number of patterns you have in your | separated list of patterns.