counting words then amending to a file

magnia

i want to count the number of words in a file and then redirect this to a file


echo 'total number of words=' wc -users>file


THis isnt working, anyone any ideas.

henbane

Wouldn't the dash cause a problem? 'man wc' is very useful in these situations

ceidefields

echo "total number of words=" > test.log; wc -w names.log >> test.log

I think that's what you want - test.log is your output file. Names.log is the file you're counting words in.

Khannie

Do me a favour please....just keep all your questions to one thread? You have 4 on the go now.

niallb

echo 'total number of words='$(cat /tmp/yourinputfile \
| wc -w ) | tee /tmpyouroutputfile

This contains a number of constructions that would be useful in similar exercises.
I also agree with Khannie that you should keep these on one thread.

tee is handy when debugging as you can easily keep track of a number of outputs and it saves you having to open the output file to see if anything happened.

It's also a really useful trick for writing out to a root owned file from a
process run by your user account under ubuntu/OSX or similar.

[b]sudo[/b] arp -an | awk ' { print $4"\t "$2 } ' | tr -d \(\) \
| grep -v incomplete [b]>>/etc/ethers[/b] [i]won't work[/i]

arp -an | awk ' { print $4"\t "$2 } ' | tr -d \(\) \
| grep -v incomplete [b] | sudo tee -a /etc/ethers[/b] [i]will[/i]

If by amending you really mean appending you can find the
right flag using man tee or as you know, just use >>.
You need to be more careful with how you phrase your questions,
to make sure they're what you really want.
You unix shell will do exactly what you tell it to do, and it will
be much less forgiving of your attention to spelling and punctuation than this forum.
cd /tmp ; rm -rf * is very different to
cd / tmp ; rm -rf *
It's only a space, but it'll give you a lot of space on your drive,
or on the drive of your new employers database server for example if you miss it.

You're asking good questions here, and I'm sure a lot of people are enjoying
seeing them answered. It would be good though if you posted up your final scripts so that everyone can see the finished article.

How did you get on in the job interview a few weeks ago?
Did you get the first batch of scripts in on time?
Ideally, you shouldn't be learning unix for an interview, but for the job itself.
Are you confident that if you get the position you'll be able to learn on the job quickly enough to be useful?

How confident are you that your prospective employer isn't one of us :-)
That need not be a bad thing. The most important single ability a Unix user and
particularly an admin can have is knowing where to look for help and how to ask
for it. This forum is quite suitable for what you're asking.

Finally, take a read of the "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide". Realising that
you only need know a tenth of it to be really useful will take the edge off it!
Having an idea of what else is possible though is important, and nobody writes
scripts using structures they themselves use rarely without looking up syntax
or flags.

Good luck with it,
NiallB

Khannie

Great post Niallb. Fitting that it's your 1000th.

Edit: Holy crap. I just hit 5000 with that one.