Count total number of occurrences through all the lines through all the files in a given branch of git repository

Question

I can find all the lines containing "my string" pattern in a single branch of my git repository by following command

git grep "my string" my_branch

Say, it results in following

my_branch: file1:file1 What is "my string"?
my_branch: file2:file2 Hello, "my string" is just "my string"!

We see 3 occurrences in two lines of two files. I can count these lines via

git grep "my string" my_branch | wc -l

It will result in

2

The question is how to get the exact number of string occurrences through all the lines through all the files in a given branch? Is it possible to run some command or script that will give me 3 in my example, not 2?

Answer 1

You can use -o option in grep for your requirement and pass it to wc -l for the count:

Inside man grep:

-o, --only-matching
              Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with each such part on a separate output line.

This should work for you:

git grep -o "my string" my_branch | wc -l

Please note that to use -o option, the git version must be 2.18 or higher.