How do we exactly count the occurrence of a particular character in a string in bash scripting? Well, there's quite a number of ways of doing this. Here's the simplest that I know of. no_fields=`echo "a|b|c " |awk -F"|" '{print NF}' ` echo $no_fields

What the hell this means? Here's the simple explanation. 1. echo "a|b|c" - output the string 2. -F"|" - change the field separator into pipe 3. '{print NF}' - prints the number of files in the string based on the separator set by -F.

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