Number of files containing a given string

How can I count the number of files (in a directory) containing a given string as input in bash/sh?

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Answers:

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Method 1

grep -l "string" * | wc -l will search for “string” in the contents of all files in the working directory and tell you how many matched.

Method 2

greps parameter -l will only output the filenames which are matching $PATTERN, wc can count them afterwards.

grep -l "$PATTERN" * | wc -l

Method 3

awk '/pattern_to_look_for/ {s+=1; nextfile;} END {print s}' *

Clarification: This looks for the number of files that has the “pattern_to_look_for” in their contents and not in their filenames (like Wag’s answer). From your question it’s hard to tell what you are looking for.

Method 4

This works in Bash with any filename:

grep -lZ "$pattern" * | tr -cd '00' | wc -c

Explanation:

grep‘s -Z option prints every result with a ␀-byte separator. This character can’t be part of a file name, so we can simply count the number of separators to get the number of files.
To get rid of the other characters in the output, we simply remove everything except the ␀ bytes using tr.
Then just count the characters with wc.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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