grep help

[ctid]

Hi

Does anyone know how to use grep to return the number of files in a directory that contain the search string? I can get it to return the lines that match, but not the number. I've used:

grep -c /usr/bin/*a* > outputfile

This returns all the lines that match and writes them to outputfile, but I need the number of matches.

Thanks

[ikonia]

greps not the right tool for the job as its looking for a regular expresion to which the char "a" is not.

you want

ls /usr/bin/*a* | wc -l

or you can do something weak with grep, but it won't give you the results you want, but I'll put it to show how using grep is the wrong tool

grep -c a /usr/bin/*

or a dirty fugde

ls /usr/bin/*a* | grep -c a

the last two are just to show that grep is the wrong tool for the job and how your miss-interperating its use.

[ctid]

Ah, thanks for the help. I'd forgotten about wc. Have been sat here for the past hour trying to get grep to work, and searching the Internet for the answer

Cheers