UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

Is anyone able to help with the following query?

I have an input file with several lines of words, e.g.
"hellolaylahello"
"hellohellohellolayla"

I want to search for the exact string "hello" in each line and display:
2 "hellolaylahello"
3 "hellohellohellolayla"

I have tried:
echo 'hellolaylahello' | awk '{print match($0, "hello")}' (but I only get the first instance of where hello begins.) If I can get a count OR the start positions it would be a great help.

Cheers
Layla

this will give you the count of hello in a line

Code:

echo 'hellolaylahello' |awk '{ total += gsub("hello","")}END { print total }'

Thank you..I have just spent the past one hour trying all sorts of other ways using R program, but to no avail. Can I combine a loop into the code you provided to do the command to all lines in a file?

I tried the following but I got 0 for each line:
awk -F, '{x=0;for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)if($i == "hello" ) x++; print x}' test

Code:

awk '{ total += gsub("hello","")}END { print total }' filename

just provide the filename which contains hello it will give the total count including all lines

As this was the most logical thing to try I had already this, but it gives me a total count of all the "hello" from all of the lines.

Perhaps my first email was not clear (sorry for this). Im looking for the number of occurences of the string "hello" on each line of the file.

So if input file has 2 lines:
hellolaylahellolayla
hellohellohello

Then output should be:
2 ("hello" matched in line 1 twice)
3 ("hello" matched in line 2 a total of 3 times)

A count of 5 is not needed!

Cheers for any help in awk, sed or even perl (but im not very clever with perl yet)

Layla

use -w option to grep

grep -w "search string" file name

Thank you but this is already a tried method and does not work if you want to search for a string in a continuous word. eg.

filein:
hellohellolayla

grep -w "hello" filein
Returns a blank, because I am searching for a substring and not a whole string as the option -w forces.

Thanks anyway...any other help from anyone...I am close but need a little more advice