searching letters in one line using grep and wc

Question

I've created a text file with 1000 random uppercase and lowercase letters:

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | head -c 1000 > file1

How many times does the word 'cat' appear in this file, using grep and wc?

I did it this way:

grep -ic cat file1

But it counts lines in which it appears, while I want to check how many times it appears in that one line. Any idea?

Answer 1

Work I have to do is find how many times in this file, appears world 'cat' using command grep and wc.

Try:

grep -oi cat file1 | wc -l

Example:

$ cat file1 
foo cat bar zoo cat
random text cat dog
foobar cat
end!

^We have four occurances of cat above.

grep -oi cat file1 | wc -l
4

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From man grep (my emphasis):

       -o, --only-matching
              Print  only  the  matched  (non-empty) parts of a matching line,
              with each such part on a separate output line.