Find Command – How to Count Text Occurrences in Files

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I am trying to run the find command to find the total number of occurrences of a particular text string and also the number of files which has this text string.

What I have right now is this command.

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "abc"

This reports all the "*.txt" files which contain the text "abc". I want either one or two find command to get

  1. Total number of times abc appears
  2. Total number of files which has abc in it.

Best Answer

For question 1, you can do this:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "abc" | wc -l

This counts the total number of matches for abc in all text files.

And for question 2, I came up with:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -i "abc" {} + | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq | wc -l

This gets just the unique filenames from the list of matches and counts them (the sort is probably not needed).

As pointed out by miracle173, grep comes with a "one match per file" flag so the command can be shortened to just:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -il "abc" {} + | wc -l

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