How would you count every occurrence of a term in all files in the current directory?

Question

How would you count every occurrence of a term in all files in the current directory? - and subdirectories(?)

I've read that to do this you would use grep; what is the exact command?

Also, is it possible to the above with some other command?

Answer 1

Using grep + wc (this will cater for multiple occurences of the term on the same line):

grep -rFo foo | wc -l

• -r in grep: searches recursively in the current directory hierarchy;
• -F in grep: matches against a fixed string instead of against a pattern;
• -o in grep: prints only matches;
• -l in wc: prints the count of the lines;

% tree                 
.
├── dir
│   └── file2
└── file1

1 directory, 2 files
% cat file1 
line1 foo foo
line2 foo
line3 foo
% cat dir/file2 
line1 foo foo
line2 foo
line3 foo
% grep -rFo foo | wc -l
8

Answer 2

grep -Rc [term] * will do that. The -R flag means you want to recursively search the current directory and all of its subdirectories. The * is a file selector meaning: all files. The -c flag makes grep output only the number of occurrences. However, if the word occurs multiple times on a single line, it is counted only once.

From man grep:

  -r, --recursive
          Read all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line.
          This is equivalent to the -d recurse option.

   -R, --dereference-recursive
          Read all files under each directory, recursively.  Follow all symbolic links, unlike -r.

If you have no symbolic links in your directory, there is no difference.

Answer 3

In a small python script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import os
import sys

s = sys.argv[1]
n = 0
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(os.getcwd()):
    for f in files:
        f = root+"/"+f      
        try:
            n = n + open(f).read().count(s)
        except:
            pass
print(n)

• Save it as count_string.py.

• Run it from the directory with the command:

    python3 /path/to/count_string.py <term>
  

Notes

• If the term includes spaces, use quotes.
• It counts every occurence of the term recursively, also if multiple occurences in one line.

Explanation:

# get the current working directory
currdir = os.getcwd()
# get the term as argument
s = sys.argv[1]
# count occurrences, set start to 0 
n = 0
# use os.walk() to read recursively
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(currdir):
    for f in files:
        # join the path(s) above the file and the file itself
        f = root+"/"+f
        # try to read the file (will fail if the file is unreadable for some reason)
        try:
            # add the number of found occurrences of <term> in the file
            n = n + open(f).read().count(s)
        except:
            pass
print(n)

Answer 4

As a variant of @kos's nice answer, if you are interested in itemizing the counts, you can use grep's -c switch to count occurrences:

$ grep -rFoc foo
file1:3
dir/file2:3