Bash Shell Commands with options

Question

I'm having issues with piping the translate command into the word count command using the shell for an assignment. Using Debian 9 Linux distro.

I need to remove colons from the passwd file in the /etc directory and pipe the results into "word count" or wc -w. I have read the man pages, google searched and tried youtube videos, but could not find anything that would point me in the right direction. Things I have tried include:

tr -d ":" | wc -w /etc/passwd

tr -d [:punct:] | wc -w /etc/passwd

tr -- delete [:punct:] | wc -w /etc/passwd

tr -s [:punct:] [:space:] | wc -w /etc/passwd

tr -t [:] [" "] | wc -w /etc/passwd

The piped command is supposed to delete colons, replace them with spaces, and change the word count/"wc" commands output.

Before using translate and piping to wc, passwd's word count is equal to 37 lines, 60 words and 2054 bytes. I believe the number is supposed to increase when you remove the colons.

Possible duplicate of [Piping and Redirection](https://stackoverflow.com/q/9553628/608639), [cat file | ... vs ... Precedence](https://stackoverflow.com/q/12942042/608639), etc. — jww, May 24 '19 at 23:57

Tony Stark · Answer 1 · 2019-05-25T06:32:35.297

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You have to send the content of the file to tr first.

< /etc/passwd tr ":" " " | wc -w

Or with cat, even when it's a useless use of cat.

cat /etc/passwd | tr ":" " " | wc -w

edited May 25 '19 at 06:32

answered May 24 '19 at 23:38

Tony Stark

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note: this is a [useless use of cat](http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat) – hek2mgl May 25 '19 at 01:50
Thanks! It didn't occur to me that you had to redirect it to the file. Still crawling while trying to learn the command line. – Aaron Thomason May 28 '19 at 03:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 25 '19 at 06:33

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you mean something like this?

tr ":" " " < /etc/passwd | wc -w

answered May 25 '19 at 06:33

UtLox

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Thank you, that works as well, I didn't know how many ways you could skin this cat until I saw the responses! – Aaron Thomason May 28 '19 at 03:19

Bash Shell Commands with options

2 Answers2