How do I count the number of occurrences of a string in an entire file?

Question

Is there an inbuilt command to do this or has anyone had any luck with a script that does it?

I am looking to count the number of times a certain string (not word) a

Answer 1

Using perl's "Eskimo kiss" operator with the -n switch to print a total at the end. Use \Q...\E to ignore any meta characters.

perl -lnwe '$a+=()=/\Q(*)/g; }{ print $a;' file.txt

Script:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $count;
my $text = shift;

while (<>) {
    $count += () = /\Q$text/g;
}

print "$count\n";

Usage:

perl script.pl "(*)" file.txt