Use ag
ag aka Silver Searcher is an alternative to ack etc.
It is very fast and easy to use, give it a spin.
Working with -c (count)
I use ag to search a large code base locally, often looking for usage or bad patterns.
Just recently I was looking for the error message: something went wrong.
So I did ag -c 'something went wrong'
It outputs the files and the count.
So in order to sum the counts, I did the following:
ag -c 'something went wrong' | awk -F: '{s+=$2} END {print s}'
762
I got a sum YAY! but the number however was a tad to high for my liking.
Do note that the string is written in all lower-case so I count both:
Something went wrongsomething went wrong
As the same string.
If I do:
ag -c 'Something went wrong' | awk -F: '{s+=$2} END {print s}'
745
The number is lower, since the search becomes case-sensitive.