Counting lines starting with a symbol

Question

There are many lines containing the > symbol in a file. How can I count the total number of > symbols in a file? I have tried sed and grep and it did not work.

Answer 1

You can use GNU grep together with wc

grep -o '>' file.txt | wc -l

grep -o prints every match on a separate line. wc counts the lines.

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Btw, it's not 100% clear in your question if the > can appear only at the start of a line. If you just want to count the lines that start with a > you can use the following grep command:

grep -c '^[[:space:]]*>' file.txt

^ matches the beginning of the line, [[:space:]]* allows for zero ore more space characters in front of the >, just in case.