Finding out how many programs I have not installed from a list with grep/awk in archlinux

Question

I want to see how many packages from a list are not installed. I use archlinux, so I use pacman -Q to determine if a package is installed. If it is not installed, it returns a message like: "error: package 'package-name' was not found".

I thought I could use grep -c 'error' like this:

pacman -Q autoconf automake binutils bison fakeroot flex gcc libtool m4 make patch pkg-config | grep -c 'error'

But for me it returns:

error: package 'bison' was not found
error: package 'pkg-config' was not found
0

It returns 0, but I would like it to return 2. Even with awk it doesn't work:

pacman -Q autoconf automake binutils bison fakeroot flex gcc libtool m4 make patch pkg-config | awk '/error: / {count++} END {print count}'

For me, this returns:

error: package 'bison' was not found
error: package 'pkg-config' was not found

So my guess is that variable count doesn't even have a value since it doesn't get printed. I also tried wc -l, but that doesn't work, it just returns 0 for me.

What is the correct way to print the number of not-installed packages?

EDIT: I noticed when I do:

pacman -Q autoconf automake binutils bison fakeroot flex gcc libtool m4 make patch pkg-config > tempfile  
cat tempfile

The two rows containing the error message are not added to tempfile (the rest of the command output does). Thought this might help solving this problem.

Answer 1

The problem is the error messages are not send to STDOUT but STDERR. You have to explicitly redirect STDERR as well, e.g:

pacman -Q bison patch pkg-config 2>&1 | grep -c 'error'

If you have something like bash or zsh you can use |& to automatically redirect STDOUT as well as STDERR:

pacman -Q bison patch pkg-config |& grep -c 'error'

Answer 2

The errors are printed to stderr, not stdout. Your pipe (|) only sees the stdout output. You can redirect stderr to stdout before the pipe, and then all of your output will go through grep:

pacman -Q autoconf automake binutils bison fakeroot flex gcc libtool m4 make patch pkg-config 2>&1 | grep -c 'error'

Answer 3

You can use wc -l to count the number of lines outputted.

So if pacman -Q autoconf automake binutils bison fakeroot flex gcc libtool m4 make patch pkg-config | grep -c 'error' is outputting:

error: package 'bison' was not found
error: package 'pkg-config' was not found

you can run pacman -Q autoconf automake binutils bison fakeroot flex gcc libtool m4 make patch pkg-config | grep -c 'error' | wc -l to count the number of times grep outputted a line.