The other day I was trying to figure out how to count the number of words in a text line in unix.
My issue is that I was editing a specific “field” with a PERL command, but I was worried that in the off chance the numerical variable occurred more than once, in places I wasn’t expecting, my efforts to replace the variable could go horribly wrong and I could end up replacing all the wrong occurrences of where the variable occurred.
I tried hunting it down but it took forever to find any references. Most that I found actually didn’t work. But then I found this little trick.
I hope it helps you count how many times a word or variable occur in a sentence!
$ echo “dog dog” | tr ” ” “\n” | grep -c “dog”
2
Now I leave it up to you to figure out how to apply this little trick to your own project!
A Thought: The other day… I should name my how to’s that… “The Other Day” series, because I seem to always start these that way!
