Question

I have tried:

 grep -c '\|' *.*  

But it didn’t work, since it gives an incorrect count of consecutive pipes.

How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Another option, using Perl, is:

perl -e 'while(<>){$c+=tr/|/|/};print '$c\n'' * 

In non-one-liner format that’s:

while(<>){     $c += tr/|/|/ } print '$c\n' 

The while(<>){ line is Perl magic for reading lines from files on the command or from STDIN. You get used to it after a while. The line itself goes into a variable called $_, which is the default parameter for many Perl commands. For instance tr, which works quite a bit like tr(1), defaults to operating on $_. I’m putting my results in a global variable called $c. (In a full program, it’s best to declare it a lexical variable with my $c = 0; outside the loop.) The += operator adds the result of the tr command (the number of pipe characters in this case) to the current value of $c.

Just using tr(1) is clearly a simpler option. 😉

Using *.* is a DOSism that you don’t likely want to use on a UNIX-like platform.

Using single quotes to avoid having the shell interpret the pipe character reads a bit better. For instance, I tested my answer with:

$ echo '|||| |||||' | perl -e 'while(<>){$c+=tr/|/|/};print '$c\n'' 9