The Poker Copilot Blog

Tracking the development of Poker Copilot, Mac OS X software for poker analysis and statistics.

Monday, 28 July 2008

Question for a Unix Command Line Tool Expert

Unix command line tools have never been a strong area for me. Who can suggest a solution to the following problem?

I have many text files in a folder. I would like to list a count of how many lines a certain regular expression matches within each file. The output would be something like this:

file1.txt: 23
file2.txt 0
file3.txt 37

I'm sure there must be a way using grep, sort, wc, and so on, without resorting to a for loop in a script file. However I haven't found it yet.

2 comments:

Mark L. Smith said...: Try this:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -print -exec sh -c 'cat $1 | tr " " "\n" | grep mark | wc -l' {} {} \;; 28 July 2008 8:46 PM
Steve McLeod said...: Thanks for the help, Mark. While trying to adapt your suggestion, I accidentally discovered that grep alone does exactly what I want, once I have the command line parameters correct:

grep -c '[my regular expression]' *.txt; 28 July 2008 11:29 PM