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Another Unix Tip

How to count the instances of a given character in a file? grep -c won’t do it - instead it counts the number of maching lines. You need:

cat foo.c | tr -c -d ';' | wc -c

Which counts all the semicolons in foo.c. (source)

Unix - it’s the OS that won’t cop out when there’s text all about! (source)

Hmmm… semicolons. Are you sure you don’t want SLOCCount instead?

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/sloccount.html

:)

The example given was purely hypothetical and bears no resemblance to idiotic management requests for coding metrics, living or dead.

You believe me, right? :)

This works, I actually had a business requirement to count the instances of a '$' in a file. Go figure.