How to make my shell script check every folder in

Question

I have a folder reviews_folder that contains lots of files, such as hotel_217616.dat. I have written a script countreviews.sh to check the number of times the word "Author" appears in each file and then print the number out for each respective file. Here is my script:

grep -r "<Author>" "#1"

I cannot write reviews_folder in the shell code, it must take it as an argument in the command line, hence #1. The number of time my word appears in each file must then be ranked from highest to lowest, for example

-- run script --
49
23
17

However, when I run my script it says "#1: No such file or directory"; why isn't it replacing #1 with reviews_folder when I type:

./countreviews.sh reviews_folder

My countreviews.sh is sitting in the same directory as my reviews_folder, which contains the files I will be checking if that matters.

Answer 1

First off, the positional parameter is $1 and not #1.

Secondly, your script doesn't really "count the number of time the word Author appears"; it looks literally for <Author>, including the angle brackets.

I assume you wanted word boundaries, as in \<Author\>.

grep -r just lists all matching lines, prepended by filenames. You want only the count, and sorted. To do this, you can do

grep -rwch 'Author'

• -w searches for word matches
• -c returns a match count per file
• -h suppresses writing the file name

And to sort the output, you pipe it to sort:

grep -rwch 'Author' | sort -nr

-n is for "numerical sort", and -r for "reverse", so the largest number is first.

Notice how this still only counts how many lines matched "Author"; if there is a line with five matches, it is counted only as one by grep -c.

To properly count every single occurrence, you could to this:

find . -type f -exec bash -c 'grep -wo "Author" {} | wc -l' \; | sort -nr

• find . -type f finds recursively all files.
• -exec executes a command for each file found. Because we use a pipe in that command, we have to spawn a subshell with bash -c.
• grep -wo "Author" {} | wc -l finds every match of Author and prints it on a separate line; wc -l then counts the lines.
• After this happened for all files, sort -nr again sorts the results.

Answer 2

ITYM $1, not #1

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