I need to count no. of commas in each line of a csv file which contains text with spaces: e.g. below text in a file [mig@cpeuidb bin]$ cat cmt.txt_bkp this, is a ,comma ,count test1 this, is a ,comma ,count test2 this, is a ,comma ,count test3 Thisisaline,withoutspace,test1 Thisisaline,withoutspace,test2 this, line is ,lacking comma test1 this, line is ,lacking comma test2 i had written script with for loop, problem is, whenever there is a space it splits text into new line, so incorrect count of commas in a line: Please help me out to resolve this problem: Here is my code for references: [mig@cpeuidb bin]$ cat cmt.ksh #!/bin/ksh . /home/mig/dm_setup for k in `cat cmt.csv ` do echo $k > tmp.lst line_comma_cnt=`awk ' BEGIN { count=0; } { for (i=1;i<=length($0);i++) { if(substr($0,i,1)=="," ) {count++;} } } END {print count} ' tmp.lst` echo "New count: $line_comma_cnt" done exit 0