GREP or WC?

[jodders]

I a little rusty on UNIX and was wondering if anyone can tell me the commands for this.

I have a database with group names,username and name

eg. B ID123 Jones/A
C iD122 SMilth/a
B id322 Hae/H

and want to just count the group names.

B 2

Cant seem to find how to do this.I have tried using

wc -l < .txt, but that only counts the lines,and not the group.

 

[Salem]

Use

grep -c 'B' file

to count the number of matches.

--

 

[aigles]

To test for 'B' in field 1 only :

grep -c '^B' file

Jean Pierre.

 

[PHV]

To count all the groups:[tt][ignore]
awk '
{++a[$1]}END{for(g in a)print g,a[g]}
' /path/to/inputfile[/ignore][/tt]

Hope This Help, PH.
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