Question

I would like to help out my girlfriend – she needs the specific count of certain characters in around 200 files (per file).

I already found How can I use the UNIX shell to count the number of times a letter appears in a text file?, but that only shows the complete number, not the number of occurrences per file. basically, what I want is the following:

$ ls 
test1   test2
$ cat test1
ddddnnnn
ddnnddnnnn
$ cat test2
ddnnddnnnn
$ grep -o 'n' * | wc -w
16
$ <insert command here>
test1 10
test2 6
$

or something similar regarding the output. As this will be on her university machine, I cannot code anything in perl or so, just shell is allowed. My shell knowledge is a bit rusty, so I cannot come up with a better solution – maybe you could be of assistance.

Answer 1

grep -Ho n * | uniq -c

produces

 10 test1:n
  6 test2:n

If you want exactly your output:

grep -Ho n * | uniq -c | while read count file; do echo "${file%:n} $count"; done