Count number of occurrences of a pattern in a file even on same line

Question

When searching for number of occurrences of a string in a file  I generally use   grep pattern file   wc -l   However  this only finds one occurrence per line  because of the way grep works  How can I search for the number of times a string appears in a file  regardless of whether they are on the same or different lines   Also  what if I m searching for a regex pattern  not a simple string  How can I count those  or  even better  print each match on a new line

User · Answer

A belated post  Use the search regex pattern  as a Record Separator  RS  in awk This allows your regex to span  n-delimited lines  if you need it      printf  X  n moo X n XX n        awk -vRS  X  X  X   END print  NR lt 2 0 NR-1

User · Answer

Try this   grep  string to search for  FileNameToSearch   cut -d     -f 4   sort -n   uniq -c   Sample   grep  SMTP connect from unknown  maillog   cut -d     -f 4   sort -n   uniq -c   6  SMTP connect from unknown  188 190 118 90   54  SMTP connect from unknown  62 193 131 114    3  SMTP connect from unknown  91 222 51 253

User · Answer

To count all occurrences  use -o  Try this   echo afoobarfoobar   grep -o foo   wc -l   And man grep of course     Update  Some suggest to use just grep -co foo instead of grep -o foo   wc -l   Don t   This shortcut won t work in all cases  Man page says   -c print a count of matching lines   Difference in these approaches is illustrated below   1     echo afoobarfoobar   grep -oc foo 1   As soon as the match is found in the line  a foo barfoobar  the searching stops  Only one line was checked and it matched  so the output is 1  Actually -o is ignored here and you could just use grep -c instead   2     echo afoobarfoobar   grep -o foo foo foo    echo afoobarfoobar   grep -o foo   wc -l 2   Two matches are found in the line  a foo bar foo bar  because we explicitly asked to find every occurrence  -o   Every occurence is printed on a separate line  and wc -l just counts the number of lines in the output

User · Answer

Hack grep s color function  and count how many color tags it prints out   echo -e  a nb  b b nc ndef nb e brb nr      GREP COLOR  033  grep --color always  b     perl -e  undef         lt  gt   s  n  g  s  x1b x5b x30 x33 x33  n g  print         wc -l

User · Answer

Ripgrep  which is a fast alternative to grep  has just introduced the --count-matches flag allowing counting each match in version 0 9  I m using the above example to stay consistent     gt  echo afoobarfoobar   rg --count foo 1  gt  echo afoobarfoobar   rg --count-matches foo 2   As asked by OP  ripgrep allows for regex pattern as well  --regexp  lt PATTERN gt    Also it can print each  line  match on a separate line    gt  echo -e  line1foo nline2afoobarfoobar    rg foo line1foo line2afoobarfoobar

[search] Count number of occurrences of a pattern in a file (even on same line)

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