Count occurrences of character per line/field on Unix

To count occurrence of a character per line you can do:

awk -F'|' 'BEGIN{print "count", "lineNum"}{print gsub(/t/,"") "\t" NR}' file
count lineNum
4       1
3       2
6       3

To count occurrence of a character per field/column you can do:

column 2:

awk -F'|' -v fld=2 'BEGIN{print "count", "lineNum"}{print gsub(/t/,"",$fld) "\t" NR}' file
count lineNum
1       1
0       2
1       3

column 3:

awk -F'|' -v fld=3 'BEGIN{print "count", "lineNum"}{print gsub(/t/,"",$fld) "\t" NR}' file
count lineNum
2       1
1       2
4       3

• gsub() function’s return value is number of substitution made. So we use that to print the number.
• NR holds the line number so we use it to print the line number.
• For printing occurrences of particular field, we create a variable fld and put the field number we wish to extract counts from.