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SC2026
Vidar Holen edited this page Jan 21, 2015
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grep foo | wc -l
grep -c foo
This is purely a stylistic issue. grep
can count lines without piping to wc
.
Note that in many cases, this number is only used to see whether there are matches (i.e. > 0
). In these cases, it's better and more efficient to use grep -q
and check its exit status:
if grep -q pattern file
then
echo "The file contains the pattern"
fi
If you e.g. want to count characters instead of lines, and you actually care about the number and not just whether it's greater than 0.