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Often, the first thing you (or your boss) want to know about your sequencing run is simply, "how many reads do I haveare there?". For the $BI/gva_course/mapping/data/SRR030257_1.fastq file, the answer is 3,800,180. How can we figure that out?

The grep (or Global Regular Expression Print) command can be used to determine the number of lines which match some criteria as shown above. Above we searched used it to search for:

  1. anything from the group of ACTGN with the [] marking them as a group
  2. matching any number of times *
  3. from the beginning of the line ^
  4. to the end of the line $

Here, since we are only interested in the number of reads that we have, we can make use of knowing the 3rd line in the fastq file is a + and a + only, and grep's -c option to simply report the number of reads in a file.

Code Block
languagebash
titleCan you use the information above to write a grep command to count the number of reads in the same file?
collapsetrue
grep -c "^+$" $BI/gva_course/mapping/data/SRR030257_1.fastq

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