August 3, 2023

Count the number of files grepped with wc

To count the number of files grepped¹ , pipe the output of grep into wc as such:

$ grep -ld s pattern file | wc -l

For example:

$ grep -ld s Alice * | wc -l

will display the number of files which include the word Alice in the current directory.

In this example, we use the utility grep to print the files which lines match the pattern Alice, then we pipe the output to wc to count the number of files.

We tell grep to invoke the option -l so it prints the name of the files only once. Otherwise, grep would print each occurrence of the pattern, and possibly duplicating the name of files in the output. As a result, wc, which counts the number of lines of the output, would count a file multiple times.

The option -d invokes with s tells grep to skip directories.

To learn about wc run $ man wc.

To learn about grep run $ man grep.

grep is copyleft-licensed and is maintained by Jim Meyering².

wc was first released in 1971³. It is now part of the GNU coreutils package which is copyleft-licensed and is maintained by Jim Meyering⁴

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1. To grep is a verb. It was added to the Oxford English Dictionnary in 2003; see “New words list December 2003”. Oxford English Dictionary.↩︎

2. GNU Grep official website.↩︎

3. wc’s first man page.↩︎

4. Coreutils - GNU core utilities’s webpage.↩︎

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