I didn't downvote you, but I'm guessing you're being downvoted because the answer is just "grep -c", which counts matches instead of printing them, and I discovered that in about ten seconds by googling "grep count matches". (I actually didn't know about that option, though! I'd have reflexively used "grep | wc -l" to count matched lines, because I know that wc is what you use to count things.)
Ah. Yes, that's fair, grep -c counts matching lines, not matches - which is something I've never actually run into as an issue, so I didn't know about it.
On further Googling (about a minute this time, with a few different pages) I found that 'grep -o' would do the trick (and someone beat me to it, above.)
I'd still argue that one minute of Googling would be quicker than writing a program to do the same.
The program took me about 10 minutes to write. I think that's pretty good compared to the googling and finding out that `-c` doesn't work (which I also did).
Plus it's written in a robust language. The `grep | wc` solution here looks ok, but in my experience bash hacks tend to be full of bugs, especially around quoting, whitespace, etc.
