Grep prints one line per match. To return the number if matches, use the -c switch:

grep -c "something" filename

Growing Rails Applications in Practice

Check out our e-book. Learn to structure large Ruby on Rails codebases with the tools you already know and love.

• Introduce design conventions for controllers and user-facing models
• Create a system for growth
• Build applications to last

Read more Show archive.org snapshot

However, if a word appears more than once in a line, it is only counted once.

To count every match, you can use sed Show archive.org snapshot to force line breaks on multiple matches:

sed 's/something/something\n/g' filename | grep -c "something"