On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 04:10:05PM -0400, Ross S. W. Walker wrote: > Stephen Harris wrote: > > > > On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 04:32:30PM -0300, mups.cp wrote: > > > A simple one > > > # echo "jerry jerry" | tr " " "\n" | grep -c jerry > > > 2 > > > > But what about jerry.jerry or jerry/jerry or jerry,jerry or.... > > Well he never stated a non-standard field separator, but if that is the case, with awk: The question wasn't suficiently well defined. After all, is "jerryjerry" a count of "1" or "2" ? :-) :-) To make the "tr" case more general: echo "jerry jerry" | tr -c '[:alnum:]' '\012' | grep -c jerry Or we could be silly (if each occurance is meant to be counted): echo "jerry jerryjerryjerryhellojerry" | sed 's/jerry/\ jerry/g' | grep -c jerry -- rgds Stephen