grep -c
SH-2126Consider using grep -c
instead of grep | wc
.
This is purely a stylistic issue. grep
can count lines without piping to wc
.
Often this number is only used to see whether there are matches (i.e. == 0
).
In these cases it's clearer and more efficient to use grep -q
and check its exit status:
if grep -q pattern file; then
echo "The file contains the pattern"
fi
Also note that in foo | grep bar | wc -l
, wc
will mask the exit code of grep
by default and always return success unless a directive like set -o pipefail
is present.
By instead writing foo | grep -c bar
, grep
will exit with a non-zero value when there are no matches.
This is generally desirable (see below), but may require handling when used with set -e
.
grep foo | wc -l
grep -c foo
For Multiple Files, instead of:
grep foo *.log | wc -l
You can pipe all the file contents into grep
(passing the files directly to grep
causes -c
to print each file's count separately, rather than the total):
cat *.log | grep foo -c
If you find piping to wc
is clearer in a given situation it's fine to ignore this issue.