use grep to count the number of times a word got repeated in a file
If you are just looking to count '< item>' alone, then I like MillaresRoo's grep -o solution. If you are looking to count items more generally, then consider:
$ sed 's/></>\n</g' a.xml | sort | uniq -c 1 <cause> 2 <item> 1 <queue>Or, showing the input explicitly on the command line:
$ echo '<queue><item><cause><item>' | sed 's/></>\n</g' | sort | uniq -c 1 <cause> 2 <item> 1 <queue>
Using awk you can do that in a single command:
awk -F '<item>' '{print NF-1}' a.xmlOnline Demo: http://ideone.com/vheDgq
OR to get total count for whole file use:
awk -F '<item>' '{s+=NF-1}END{print s}' a.xml