Question

I’m a new biotechnology student working on my introduction to programming assignment, I’ve hit a brick wall. The question is as follows.

“(3) In your new “.bashrc1” file, how many of the space-delimited 2nd entries on each line have the numbers 0…9 in them? Pipe your answer out to a new file “.bashrc1.counts” in the form “number, count … ” (eg 0, 12 …) .”

What I’ve done so far is

more .bashrc1 |  awk ‘{print $2}’ | grep –c “0..9” > .bashrc1.counts

I know the grep part is probably wrong, is there any way to pass it a range? like

grep -c "0","1"... etc

or do I have to do

|grep -c "0"|grep -c "1"|

Also, I get how to output to the file, but how in the world do I format the output in such a manner?
I’ve exhausted google and my lecture notes, and can’t seem to find any relevant info with my problem.

EDIT: file I’m grepping to; just a copy of the default .bashrc file with one added alias.

# Sample .bashrc for SuSE Linux
# Copyright (c) SuSE GmbH Nuernberg
# There are 3 different types of shells in bash: the login shell, normal shell
# and interactive shell. Login shells read ~/.profile and interactive shells
# read ~/.bashrc; in our setup, /etc/profile sources ~/.bashrc - thus all
# settings made here will also take effect in a login shell.
#
# NOTE: It is recommended to make language settings in ~/.profile rather than
# here, since multilingual X sessions would not work properly if LANG is over-
# ridden in every subshell.
# Some applications read the EDITOR variable to determine your favourite text
# editor. So uncomment the line below and enter the editor of your choice :-)
#export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim
#export EDITOR=/usr/bin/mcedit
# For some news readers it makes sense to specify the NEWSSERVER variable here
#export NEWSSERVER=your.news.server
# If you want to use a Palm device with Linux, uncomment the two lines below.
# For some (older) Palm Pilots, you might need to set a lower baud rate
# e.g. 57600 or 38400; lowest is 9600 (very slow!)
#
#export PILOTPORT=/dev/pilot
#export PILOTRATE=115200
test -s ~/.alias && . ~/.alias || true
alias start = "ls ~"   

Answer 1

From what I understand, your output should contain separate entries for each number from 0 to 9, so you probably can’t produce it with 1 command without a loop.

With a for loop, you can do something like

for c in {0..9}; do
     cut -d ' ' -f 2 .bashrc1 | grep -c "$c" >> .bashrc1.counts
done