Count all occurrences of a string in lots of files with grep

eljko_Filipin_17469 0
Viewed 418847

I have a bunch of log files. I need to find out how many times a string occurs in all files.

grep -c string *

returns

...
file1:1
file2:0
file3:0
...

Using a pipe I was able to get only files that have one or more occurrences:

grep -c string * | grep -v :0

...
file4:5
file5:1
file6:2
...

How can I get only the combined count? (If it returns file4:5, file5:1, file6:2, I want to get back 8.)

grep
16 Answers
cat * | grep -c string
user_435820

Instead of using -c, just pipe it to wc -l.

grep string * | wc -l

This will list each occurrence on a single line and then count the number of lines.

This will miss instances where the string occurs 2+ times on one line, though.

Michael_Haren_290 
cat * | grep -c string

One of the rare useful applications of cat.

user_403420

If you want number of occurrences per file (example for string "tcp"):

grep -RIci "tcp" . | awk -v FS=":" -v OFS="\t" '$2>0 { print $2, $1 }' | sort -hr

Example output:

53  ./HTTPClient/src/HTTPClient.cpp
21  ./WiFi/src/WiFiSTA.cpp
19  ./WiFi/src/ETH.cpp
13  ./WiFi/src/WiFiAP.cpp
4   ./WiFi/src/WiFiClient.cpp
4   ./HTTPClient/src/HTTPClient.h
3   ./WiFi/src/WiFiGeneric.cpp
2   ./WiFi/examples/WiFiClientBasic/WiFiClientBasic.ino
2   ./WiFiClientSecure/src/ssl_client.cpp
1   ./WiFi/src/WiFiServer.cpp

Explanation:

  • grep -RIci NEEDLE . - looks for string NEEDLE recursively from current directory (following symlinks), ignoring binaries, counting number of occurrences, ignoring case
  • awk ... - this command ignores files with zero occurrences and formats lines
  • sort -hr - sorts lines in reverse order by numbers in first column

Of course, it works with other grep commands with option -c (count) as well. For example:

grep -c "tcp" *.txt | awk -v FS=":" -v OFS="\t" '$2>0 { print $2, $1 }' | sort -hr
user_54072700 
awk -v RS='' -v FPAT='fast' '{print NF,FILENAME}' <file1..N>

Take a string, make it a line look for instance of fast and then print the number of fields with the filename.

user_132825470
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