Count occurrences of a char in a string using Bash

Question

I need to count the number of occurrences of a char in a string using Bash.

In the following example, when the char is (for example) t, it

Answer 1

You can do it by combining tr and wc commands. For example, to count e in the string referee

echo "referee" | tr -cd 'e' | wc -c

output

4

Explanations: Command tr -cd 'e' removes all characters other than 'e', and Command wc -c counts the remaining characters.

Multiple lines of input are also good for this solution, like command cat mytext.txt | tr -cd 'e' | wc -c can counts e in the file mytext.txt, even thought the file may contain many lines.

*** Update ***

To solve the multiple spaces in from of the number (@tom10271), simply append a piped tr command:

 tr -d ' '

For example:

echo "referee" | tr -cd 'e' | wc -c | tr -d ' '