Alternatives for 'egrep -o "success|error|fail" <filename> | sort | uniq -c'

Here is the awk way of doing it

awk 'BEGIN{RS=" "}/success/{s++}/fail/{f++}/error/{e++}END{print "Success:"s" Failed:"f" Error:"e}' abc

But all these one liners will be bit lengthier than our good old grep

No, I think that you are as good as it gets. Naturally, you could do it with one perl script,

perl -nle  's/.*(error|fail|success).*/$1/ && $a{$_}++ ; END {  print "$_ $a{$_}" for keys %a } ' test.txt

...but it is more complex and less intuitive.

Not much shorter, but since you don't really need the regular expression, there's fgrep (grep -F).

fgrep 'success
error
fail' "$filename" | sort | uniq -c

another way to write the same thing in bash:

fgrep $'success\nerror\nfail' "$filename" | sort | uniq -c

You could write a simple bash script and then call the script, like:

#!/bin/bash
egrep -o "success|error|fail" "$1" | sort | uniq -c

and save it as (for example) myscript.sh. Then do a chmod +x myscript.sh and you can call it like myscript.sh <filename>.