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

text="(\*)"
grep -o $text file | wc -l

You can make it into a script which accepts arguments like this:

script count:

#!/bin/bash
text="$1"
file="$2"
grep -o "$text" "$file" | wc -l

Usage:

./count "(\*)" file_path