How can I count lines with title-case words of certain length?

Question

How can I create a shell script in unix/linux to find the number of lines in a text file that have words which are 5 to 10 character long and begin with a capital letter?

Answer 1

Assuming the original question meant to count the number of lines matching the above requirements, then this should do it:

grep -e '\<[[:upper:]][[:alpha:]]\{4,9\}\>' file|wc -l

Assuming it meant to print the line numbers that match:

awk --re-interval '{line = line + 1} /\<[[:upper:]][[:alpha:]]{4,9}\>/ {print line}' file

Answer 2

egrep "^[A-Z]" FILE | egrep -c "\b[A-Za-z]{5,10}\b"

The way the question is now, it means, filter out lines, starting with a capital letter (like this line) [the line has to start with a capital letter - not the word], and include a word (not necessarily the first word) which is 5 to 10 characters long.

Yes, after reading the original question, there are 4 possibilities to interpret it: The Starting word has to fulfill both requirements or it is a starting word and another word, and: Get the line numbers, or the number of lines.

To print the line numbers for lines, which begin with a capital letter, and contain a word somewhere of length 5-10, we use sed:

sed -nr '/^[A-Z][a-z]{4,9}/=;/^[A-Z].*\b[A-Za-z]{5,10}\b/=' FILE