Count total number of matches in directory with ag

ag -o --nofilename --nobreak 'searchstring' | wc -l

• -o prints each match individually
• --nofilename removes filenames from output
• --nobreak removes newlines between matches in different files

I use ag itself to match the stats. E.g.:

 >$ ag --stats --java -c 'searchstring' | ag '.*matches'
 >$ 22 matches 
 >$ 6 files contained matches

Filter with lookahead to print just the number of matches:

 >$ ag --stats --java -c 'searchstring' | ag -o '^[0-9]+(?=\smatches)'
 >$ 22   

Still no great solution, but here's what I've managed to come up with thusfar for anyone else who finds this:

If you're not searching huge amounts of files, just use ack -hcl searchterm, otherwise...

I have been able to improve the command in my question by leveraging the --stats option, which appends something like the following to the search results:

714 matches
130 files contained matches
300 files searched
123968435 bytes searched
0.126203 seconds 

For manual use, that's good enough (though it still floods the screen with all the matches), but for scripts I still need just the number. So, to that end, I've gone from the command in my question down to this:

$ ag --stats searchterm | tail -n5 | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f1

or the more succinct but less memorable

$ ag --stats searchterm | tac | awk 'NR==5 {print $1}'

(replace tac with tail -r if you don't have tac)

To save a bit more typing, I aliased the latter half of the command so I can just pipe ag --stats to my alias and get what I want. So, with alias agmatches='tac | awk "NR==5 {print \$1}' I can get just the matches by running ag --stats searchterm | agmatches.

Still would be much better if these was something built into ag to help facilitate this. I submitted a pull request for a --stats-only output option that would help, but nothing has come of that yet which is available if you build directly from the repo, but isn't yet in a stable release, so that should speed up the process a tidbit for large numbers of results.

I like gregory's answer above, but to add some more context:

ag --stats --java -c 'searchstring' | ag '.*matches'

• The --java flag indicates that ag will only search for files with .java (and .properties) extensions. So if you were searching within a python project for .py files, you would use the --python flag. Run the ag --list-file-types command for all the file types available for searching.
• The -c or --count flag provides the number of matches.