Count the number of lines in a text file that contain a specific character (Linux)?

Question

I have a .csv (utf-8 text file). It has millions of lines. I can count the lines with wc -l. I want to count only lines with specific characters in them. So if 2M of 10M lines had a "1" in them, I'd like to return 2M.

Is this possible? Will this be horrendously slow? What are some ways to do this?

You've tagged this question as `grep` and `wc`. You have pretty much answered yourself. — larsks, Jan 27 '16 at 21:27

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 27 '16 at 21:38

2

This writes all lines from file.csv with a "1" to stdout:

grep "1" file.csv

With a pipe you can connect stdout (of grep) and stdin (of wc):

grep "1" file.csv | wc -l

answered Jan 27 '16 at 21:38

Cyrus

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What about `grep -c`? – Benjamin W. Jan 27 '16 at 21:39
@BenjaminW.: Yes, nice idea: `grep -c "1" file.csv` – Cyrus Jan 27 '16 at 21:40

Count the number of lines in a text file that contain a specific character (Linux)?

1 Answers1