in reply to Re^2: Counting no of '>' symbol in a file
in thread Counting no of '>' symbol in a file

Moreover, in a fasta file, the > appears only once per line, and only as the very first character

well, then

grep -c '^>' fasta-file

should do.

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

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