Dear all, How I can find the number of line(that my string exists) with awk or sed (not grep). for example :(my file) xxxxaaaxxxx rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr xxxxbbbbbxxxx zzzzzaaazzzzz zzzzzbbbbbzzzz I want to search "bbbbb" and number of line that the result is 3 (just first word that 's discovered) Thanks , T

awk /bbbbb/ test | wc -l (where test is the name of the file)

the previous post will tell how many occurences has been found. This one will return the record number: awk '/bbb/ {print NR }' file If you only need the first occurence: awk '/bbb/ {print NR }' file|tail -1

Oooppss, First occurence line number is: awk '/bbb/ {print NR }' file|head -1

This solution prevents awk from processing the remainder of the file, and also avoids the second process: awk '/bbb/ {print NR;exit}' myfile