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

Here is a faster-than-grep AWK alternative way of doing this, which handles multiple matches of per line, within a collection of XML files in a directory:

awk '//{m=gsub("","");total+=m}END{print total}' some_directory/*.xml

This works well in cases where some XML files don't have line breaks.