How can I use the UNIX shell to count the number of times a letter appears in a text file?

Question

I have a few text files and I\'d like to count how many times a letter appears in each?

Specifically, I\'d like to use the UNIX shell to do this, in the form of: cat fil

Answer 1

grep char -o filename | wc -l

Answer 2

try it with

grep  [PATTERN] -o [FILE] | wc -l

and please do not use cat if not needed.

Answer 3

echo "a/b/c/d/e/f/g" | awk -F"/" '{print NF}'

this will give the number of occurrence of character "/"

Answer 4

In this case, i'am counting the character "|":

expr `wc -c < filename` \- `tr -d \| < filename | wc -c`

Answer 5

You can try easily: grep -c 'YOUR LETTER' YOUR FILE

Answer 6

Another alternative:

tr -d -C X <infile | wc -c

where X is the character or string of characters you want to count and infile is the input file.