Use ag

ag aka Silver Searcher is an alternative to ack etc.

It is very fast and easy to use, give it a spin.

Working with `-c` (count)

I use ag to search a large code base locally, often looking for usage or bad patterns.

Just recently I was looking for the error message: something went wrong.

So I did ag -c 'something went wrong'

It outputs the files and the count.

So in order to sum the counts, I did the following:

ag -c 'something went wrong' | awk -F: '{s+=$2} END {print s}'
762

I got a sum YAY! but the number however was a tad to high for my liking.

Do note that the string is written in all lower-case so I count both:

As the same string.

If I do:

ag -c 'Something went wrong' | awk -F: '{s+=$2} END {print s}'
745

The number is lower, since the search becomes case-sensitive.