Count the number of occurrences of a string using sed?

Question

I have a file which contains \"title\" written in it many times. How can I find the number of times \"title\" is written in that file using the sed command provided that \"t

Answer 1

Revised answer

Succinctly, you can't - sed is not the correct tool for the job (it cannot count).

sed -n '/^title/p' file | grep -c

This looks for lines starting title and prints them, feeding the output into grep to count them. Or, equivalently:

grep -c '^title' file

Original answer - before the question was edited

Succinctly, you can't - it is not the correct tool for the job.

grep -c title file

sed -n /title/p file | wc -l

The second uses sed as a surrogate for grep and sends the output to 'wc' to count lines. Both count the number of lines containing 'title', rather than the number of occurrences of title. You could fix that with something like:

cat file |
tr ' ' '\n' |
grep -c title

The 'tr' command converts blanks into newlines, thus putting each space separated word on its own line, and therefore grep only gets to count lines containing the word title. That works unless you have sequences such as 'title-entitlement' where there's no space separating the two occurrences of title.