I'm trying to use tr with multiple sets and not sure how
bash, tr, wc
Solution
This should do the trick
tr -d '[:alpha:] \n' < $fileDoc | wc -c
Or perhaps if you want to include tabs in the definition of blanks
tr -d '[:alpha:][:space:]' < $fileDoc | wc -c
Based on the OP's comment, to delete alphabetical, spaces, digits, and newlines and count all remaining characters:
tr -d '[:alnum:][:space:]' < $fileDoc | wc -c
`[:alnum:]` accounts for letters of the alphabet and digits. `[:space:]` takes care of all whitespace including newlines
Problem
I have used: ``` tr -dc [:alpha:] < $fileDoc | wc -c ``` to count all letters, ``` tr -dc ' ' < $fileDoc | wc -c ``` to count all spaces, ``` tr -dc '\n' < $fileDoc | wc -c ``` to count all new lines in a text document. What I would like to do now is to do now is count all other characters in the document as I will call every thing else. Here is the text from the document: Hello this is a test text document. ``` 123 !@# ``` Is there a way to delete everything `[:alpha:]`, ``, and `\n` found and count the remaining characters?