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SC2126
Anastasis Andronidis edited this page Dec 6, 2017
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grep foo | wc -lgrep -c fooThis is purely a stylistic issue. grep can count lines without piping to wc.
Note that in many cases, this number is only used to see whether there are matches (i.e. == 0). In these cases, it's better and more efficient to use grep -q and check its exit status:
if grep -q pattern file
then
echo "The file contains the pattern"
fiAlso note that in foo | grep bar | wc -l, wc will mask the exit code of grep by default (i.e. without set -o pipefail), and always return success. If replacing with foo | grep -c bar, grep will exit non-zero when the count is 0. This is convenient for conditional statements but may require handling when used with set -e.
If you e.g. want to count characters instead of lines, and you actually care about the number and not just whether it's greater than 0, you can ignore this error.