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-ooption forgrepis not POSIX. What OS are you on?grepcommand wouldn't have worked anyway, you should specify\tas$'\t'but anyway,wc -lwould give you the total number for the whole file, not for each line. I can't find a way of getting info per line without a minimum of awk/bash/perl etc.awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"} NR==1{f=NF} f!=NF { print "tab mismatch at line "NR; exit 1; }''\t'will count the number oftletters and anyway,wc -lwill print the number of lines in total, so in this case, the total number ofts in the file, not the number per line. Tryprintf 'foo\tbar' | grep -o '\t' | wcand thenprintf 'foo\tbar' | grep -o $'\t' | wc.