To count a character in files by Find/Xargs/Sed

Question

How can you count the number of the character < in your files?

I am trying to count the number of the character "<" in my files, similarly as in Vim by

%s/<//gn

I run

 find * -type f | xargs sed 's/<//gn'

I get

sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unknown option to `s'

This error suggests me that Vim's :s -mode is not like SED.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 18 '09 at 01:12

2

I'm not familiar with the n option in Vim, but yes, sed does not support the n option. Here's another way you could count the number of instances of the < character in your files:

find * -type f | xargs cat | tr -d -c '<' | wc -c

The tr -d -c '<' command deletes all characters that are not <, and then wc -c counts the number of remaining characters.

answered Aug 18 '09 at 01:12

Adam Rosenfield

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**Does this `find * -type f | xargs cat | tr -d -c '<'` replace nearly everything in my files?** – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영 Aug 18 '09 at 01:50
No, it does not touch your files -- it prints them out to a pipe with cat, and then the pipe is filtered. The original files are not modified. – Adam Rosenfield Aug 18 '09 at 01:55
Let's assume that I remove this `cat |`. **How does the command change?** – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영 Aug 18 '09 at 14:39
Then it doesn't work, because `tr` doesn't accept filenames -- it *only* reads and writes from stdin and stdout respectively. – Adam Rosenfield Aug 18 '09 at 15:53

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '10 at 09:02

0

grep -RoE "<" * |wc -l

answered Mar 17 '10 at 09:02

ghostdog74

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To count a character in files by Find/Xargs/Sed

2 Answers2