9 replies to this topic

[ghostdog74]

NeedHelp said:

I need to do an IF statement and if there is a count of two do one thing and a count of one do another. My question is, is there a count function? My function basically looks like this:

cat filename | grep ..... | {print 1}

If there are two results in I need the 2nd one, otherwise the first one. Any ideas?

if i understand you, you wanted to count a word occurence in a file?

awk -v RS="gggg" 'END{print (NR?NR-1:0)}' file #gggg is the search string

[ghostdog74]

Jordan said:

You can also use grep for that or WC. Are you counting lines or characters?

grep -c // Line count

wc -l // Line Count

So just do a normal shell if statement on a variable that contains those values.

depending on OP's requirement, if he is counting words, grep -c would not be accurate if 2 or more words occur on a line. grep -c will count as 1, because it returns matching number of lines which the word is found.also wc -l counts number of lines, not words.

[ghostdog74]

wc -w counts total words in a file. it will not work if OP only wants to count a certain word in a file.

[ghostdog74]

for example this sample file:

# more file

this is a test line

this is second line

# wc -m file

40 file

# wc -c file

40 file

but if OP wants to count how many times the word "line" occurs, both the above will not work, whether -m or -c. however:

# awk -v RS="line" 'END{print (NR?NR-1:0)}' file

2