How to count the number of words in a string in Bash

Question

I have the following string which contains words separated by spaces

str="word1 word2 word3"

How to count the number of words?

I do not want to use a for loop with counter. I want to do it in one command.

Duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/q/638802/3076724 and http://stackoverflow.com/q/15108229/3076724 — Reinstate Monica Please, Feb 06 '14 at 10:54

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 06 '14 at 10:52

9

You can use wc:

$ wc -w <<< "$str"
3

answered Feb 06 '14 at 10:52

fedorqui

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 06 '14 at 10:51

4

Try this:

str='word1 word2 word3'
str=( $str )
echo ${#str[@]}

answered Feb 06 '14 at 10:51

Martin Dinov

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 06 '14 at 10:54

1

Using awk:

awk '{print NF}' <<< "$str"
3

answered Feb 06 '14 at 10:54

anubhava

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 06 '14 at 11:20

0

wc -w is better, here is another way:

 echo $str |tr " " "\n" |wc -l

answered Feb 06 '14 at 11:20

BMW

4 Answers4