how to find the exact pattern from a file?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
Let say there is a file a.txt which contain number rows.
My intention is to find the number of occurences of a pattern. Let say the pattern is mdbase. then it should not count the occurences of mdbase1 or mdbase2 like this. When I tried to find it like
grep "/backup/surjya/mdbase" xmldir.conf_backup | wc -w
The out put is 3 rather than 1. So please let me know how it can be resolved

Thanks

2

If mdbase is the end of the field or word separated from whatever follows by whitespace you can use:-

grep "/backup/surjya/mdbase\>" xmldir.conf_backup | wc -w

3

Without the wc

grep -c "/backup/surjya/mdbase\>" xmldir.conf_backup
4

try this
grep "^pattern$" file |wc -w

5

I tried like below:
dir2=\"$dir1"\>"\"
echo $dir2
stgdircount=`grep $dir2 xmldir.conf | wc -w | awk '{print $1}'`
echo $stgdircount

let say dir1=/backup/surjya/mdbase. hence the output for dir2 is
"/backup/surjya/mdbase\>"
and for stgdircount is 0, but exactly there is two entries in this file. Please give me some idea.

6

In the grep statment you gave, it is searching for

"/backup/surjya/mdbase\>"

I am sure you want to search for

/backup/surjya/mdbase and not the above statement.

Look at this

sh-2.05b$ cat surya.txt 
/backup/surjya/mdbasewed
/backup/surjya/mdbase2
/backup/surjya/mdbase
/backup/surjya/mdbase3
/backup/surjya/mdbase

sh-2.05b$ grep -c "/backup/surjya/mdbase\>" surya.txt 
2
sh-2.05b$ grep -c "/backup/surjya/mdbase" surya.txt 
5
7

yes you are right but why it gives 0 when I try to execute it through shell script. Let say the script is
dir1=/backup/surjya/mdbase
stgcnt=`grep -c $dir1 surya.txt `
echo $stgcnt
The value of stgcnt is 5.
Just modify the script like

dir1=/backup/surjya/mdbase
stgcnt=`grep -c \"$dir1"\>"\" surya.txt `
echo $stgcnt
The value of stgcnt is 0
I hope my question is clear.

8

Why are you gold-plating that search statement ? It is as simple as

sh-2.05b$ cat surya.sh 
#! /bin/sh
dir1=/backup/surjya/mdbase
stgcnt=$(grep -c "$dir1\>" surya.txt)
echo $stgcnt
sh-2.05b$ ./surya.sh 
2
sh-2.05b$