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From: aks@hub.ucsb.edu (Alan Stebbens)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Counting characters with Unix utilities
Message-ID: <1990Sep24.184517.7963@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 24 Sep 90 18:45:17 GMT
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Reply-To: aks@hub.ucsb.edu
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In article <4002@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> rouben@math9.math.umbc.edu writes:

rouben> How can I count the number of occurrences of a given character
rouben> in a file?  It can be done rather trivially in C, but I wonder
rouben> if it can also be done using standard unix utilities like awk,
rouben> sed, tr, wc, etc.
rouben> The closest  I have come to this is the following construction:
rouben> cat file | tr -c 'A' '' | wc -c

ed> Going back to the tr man page this one seems to work too:
ed>    cat file | tr -cd 'A' | wc -c
ed> I don't see an easy perl equivalent of the "tr -cd" idiom.

Try:
	perl -ne '$s+=tr/A//;if(eof){print $s,"\n";}' file