UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I need the total of how many times the pattern is being repeated in a particular file.

I tried with grep as below, but no go.

Code:

grep -c best sample

Contents of Sample file:
-----------------------
This is the best site I have never come across. The best one indeed.
Very best site to post queries.

Out put I got is 2, am expecting 3, as the pattern "best" is being repeated for 3 times.

Many thanks.

Rgds,

Code:

$ cat file
This is the best site I have never come across. The best one indeed.
Very best site to post queries.

$  ruby -00 -ne 'puts $_.scan(/best/).size' file
3

Code:

grep -o best sample|wc -l

using Perl - Count number of occurrences of a word

Assuming "pattern" means a whole word within a sentence and that the only delimiters are "space" and "full stop" we can break the lines up such that each word is a separate line then use "grep -x" for an exact match thereby avoiding false matches with words like "asbestos".

Code:

cat sample.txt | tr '.' ' ' | tr -s ' '|tr ' ' '\n' | grep -x "best" | wc -l

3

Thanks a lot rdcwayx and methyl.

Any idea, why my below command is not working/giving me the expected output?

Code:

perl -e '$cnt=0; while (<>) { while (m/\bpattern\b/g) {$cnt++}} print $cnt "\n"' file

assume, the file has enough no of patterns available and I am trying to count the no of occurrences of the pattern