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From: dmt@PacBell.COM (Dave Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Counting characters with unix utilities
Message-ID: <5416@ptsfa.PacBell.COM>
Date: 25 Sep 90 21:01:20 GMT
References: <4002@umbc3.UMBC.EDU>
Reply-To: dmt@PacBell.COM (Dave Turner)
Followup-To: comp.unix.questions
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 21

In article <4002@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> rouben@math9.math.umbc.edu () writes:
>How can I count the number of occurrences of a given character in a file?
>It can be done rather trivially in C, but I wonder if it can also be done
>using standard unix utilities like awk, sed, tr, wc, etc.
>
>I feel that I am missing something, and that there should be an easy way
>to count characters a la unix.  Any hints?

The following will count all the occurrences of all character types in
a file. Simple modifications could limit it to those of interest.

cat file | sed -n -e "s/./&\\
/gp" | sort | uniq -c

Note: the first line of output is the number of newline characters.




-- 
Dave Turner	415/823-2001	{att,bellcore,sun,ames,decwrl}!pacbell!dmt