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

Question

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

...
f         


        

Answer 1

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.