Shell Programming and Scripting

i'm trying to get the user to enter a character, then the script should search for how many of that character exists in the file. I have the following code, but it doesn't work properly and it shows the wrong amount (i don't think im supposed to use grep). For example, I want it to say, "There are 7 'e' characters in the file", or "There are 5 'n' characters in the file" etc...

Thanks for your help.

echo
echo "Enter the Character to Search for:"
read char
grep -c $char text
echo
echo "Press any key to continue"
read key

grep -c counts the number of lines in which the character appears.

I think the best thing to do would be to store the result of grep $char text.
Then, parse through each line of this result and count the occurence of the required character. Could get very tedious.

Or much better yet, use awk. Your field separator should be the desired character and then use the value NF.

I'm sure one could do this with a little bit of shell scripting
but Perl's transliterate operator involves less effort.

e.g. if I was interested in the No. of slashes in my passwd I could say

# perl -ne '$c+=$_=~tr|/|/|;END{print"$c\n"}' /etc/passwd
184

One way is to use tr -dc to delete anything that is not the character, then wc -c to count....

Code:

tr -dc $char < infile | wc -c

Code:

grep -o $char infile | wc -l

If you have access to a GNU grep that will work.
However, grep implementations on most Unices lack the -o switch.
Besides, I would prefer the solution posted by Ygor since a tr
should be far more efficient (you could try benchmarking both methods).
At the moment when I posted the Perl tr stuff I completely forgot
about the complement switch.
So undoubtably Ygor's is far more elegant.
One should more often look at the manpages of those text processing utilities like tr.

Hi ,

try this...program has not takes care of Blank characters

echo " Enter the File name"
read file
cnt=`wc -c < $file`
echo "Enter Character to be searched"
read char
ans=` cat $file | tr -d [$char] `
ans=`echo $ans | wc -c`
act_cnt=`expr $cnt - $ans`
echo " Their are $act_cnt '$char' characters in file $file"