How to find the total number of occurrences of text and files with find command

Question

I am trying to run the find command to find the total number of occurrences of a particular text string and also the number of files which has this text string.

What I have right now is this command.

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "abc"

This reports all the "*.txt" files which contain the text "abc". I want either one or two find command to get

1. Total number of times abc appears
2. Total number of files which has abc in it.

Answer 1

For question 1, you can do this:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i "abc" | wc -l

This counts the total number of matches for abc in all text files.

And for question 2, I came up with:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -i "abc" {} + | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq | wc -l

This gets just the unique filenames from the list of matches and counts them (the sort is probably not needed).

---

As pointed out by miracle173, grep comes with a "one match per file" flag so the command can be shortened to just:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -il "abc" {} + | wc -l

Answer 2

grep's -c option is what you need here

find . -name \*txt | xargs grep -c -i "abc" | {
    total=0
    count=0 
    while IFS=: read name num; do 
        ((num > 0)) && ((count+=1))
        ((total+=num))
    done
    echo total=$total 
    echo count=$count
}

The braces to group the commands around the while loop are required to keep the variables in one scope for that subshell.

Answer 3

$ grep -R --include='*.txt' -c -i abc . | awk -F: ' 
           BEGIN {
                    totalCount=0;noOfFiles=0;
                 } 
                 { totalCount=totalCount+$2; 
                   if ( $2 > 0 ) 
                   {
                       noOfFiles+=1;
                   } 
                 } 
            END {
             print "Total number of times abc appears:"totalCount; 
             print "Total number of files which has abc in it:"noOfFiles
            } '

(OR)

ls output should not be used to parsed by other programs. See the comment below.

$  ls -Rltr | awk '/.txt/{print $NF }' | xargs grep -c -i "abc" | awk -F: ' 
       BEGIN {
                totalCount=0;noOfFiles=0;
             } 
             { totalCount=totalCount+$2; 
               if ( $2 > 0 ) 
               {
                   noOfFiles+=1;
               } 
             } 
        END {
         print "Total number of times abc appears:"totalCount; 
         print "Total number of files which has abc in it:"noOfFiles
        } '


Result:
Total number of times abc appears:0
Total number of files which has abc in it:0

Answer 4

Number of abc's contained in files:

To count the number of all "abc"'s in the .txt files, use grep -c and find and - exceptionally - cat:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec cat {} + | grep -ic abc

Grep -c will do the total count for you - something I didn't find in SigueSigueBen's answer, which contains unjustified calls to xargs, imho. The other 2 answers where to long for me. I didn't study them and wouldn't write such things myself.

Number of files containing abc:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep -iq abc {} ";" -printf "1" | wc -c 

This will not fail with filenames (which are rarely, I admit) containing newlines in their name (which is perfectly legal).