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

You can use a simple grep to capture the number of occurrences effectively. I will use the -i option to make sure STRING/StrING/string get captured properly.

Command line that gives the files' name:

grep -oci string * | grep -v :0

Command line that removes the file names and prints 0 if there is a file without occurrences:

grep -ochi string *

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Grep only solution which I tested with grep for windows:

grep -ro "pattern to find in files" "Directory to recursively search" | grep -c "pattern to find in files"

This solution will count all occurrences even if there are multiple on one line. -r recursively searches the directory, -o will "show only the part of a line matching PATTERN" -- this is what splits up multiple occurences on a single line and makes grep print each match on a new line; then pipe those newline-separated-results back into grep with -c to count the number of occurrences using the same pattern.

Answer 4

This works for multiple occurrences per line:

grep -o string * | wc -l

Answer 5

Something different than all the previous answers:

perl -lne '$count++ for m/<pattern>/g;END{print $count}' *

Answer 6

You can add -R to search recursively (and avoid to use cat) and -I to ignore binary files.

grep -RIc string .