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[Vexor]

Hey guys, I was playing around with grep earlier and was doing some bracket counting and came across this odd little quirk.

[squib@amish eggdrop]$ grep -c '{' eggdrop.conf
15
[squib@amish eggdrop]$ grep -c '}' eggdrop.conf
16

Now I have gone through and manually counted the brackets in eggdrop.conf, they match up. The eggdrop doesn't send out any errors and in fact runs smoothly.

So I'm just wondering, is this a bug with grep or is there something I'm completely missing?
_________________
"just the usual suggestion, RTFM" --demond

[incith]

Interesting.
From a shell,

[incith]

Ah I understand, it's counting the number of line-matches the way I see it, not character matches. } is on 12 lines whereas { is on 11 lines.

[Vexor]

Ah I see. Confirmed in a test file.

Is there any way to make grep count the actual times a { or } appears in a file? It's been over a year since I've even touched a linux command.

*EDIT*
Ah, with a little bit of help from my old pal google, I came across this:

http://codesnippets.joyent.com/tag/count

perl -lne '$c++ while /STRING_TO_COUNT/g; END { print $c; }'

Example: cat eggdrop.conf | perl -lne '$c++ while /}/g; END { print $c; }'
Result: 16
cat eggdrop.conf | perl -lne '$c++ while /{/g; END { print $c; }'
16

So for anyone out there who's missing a " or {} [] etc...
cat filename | perl -lne '$c++ while /WHAT_YOURE_COUNTING_FOR/g; END { print $c; }'

*FURTHER EDIT*

Here is a simple bash script you can put in place to do this from one command:

[incith]

Er well I guess I should have posted a solution for you.

Yes, perl is one choice, although it will not be cross platform.

In Tcl..: