Question

Bash scripting is not my strongest point. I have a file structured as

% comment
filename1 pattern-to-search1
filename1 pattern-to-search2
...

I would like to write a script to grep filename for pattern-to-mat for all for every line in the file.

So far I have

while read file p
do
    if [ "${file:0:1}" != "%" ]
    then
    grep -o "$p" $file | wc -l
    fi
done
echo -e "\nDone."

But it doesn’t skip the files starting with %. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I’d simply do

grep -v '^%' | while read file p
do
    grep -c "$p" -- "$file"
done

That way, the comment lines won’t even reach the read loop