About grep
The grep
utilities are a family of Unix tools, including grep
, egrep
, and fgrep
, that perform repetitive searching tasks. The tools in the grep
family are very similar, and all are used for searching the contents of files for information that matches particular criteria. For most purposes, you'll want to use fgrep
, since it's generally the fastest.
The general syntax of the grep
commands is:
grep [-options] pattern [filename]
You can use fgrep
to find all the lines of a file that contain a particular word. For example, to list all the lines of a file named myfile
in the current directory that contain the word "dog", enter at the Unix prompt:
fgrep dog myfile
This will also return lines where "dog" is embedded in larger words, such as "dogma" or "dogged". You can use the -w
option with the grep
command to return only lines where "dog" is included as a separate word:
grep -w dog myfile
To search for several words separated by spaces, enclose the whole search string in quotes, for example:
fgrep "dog named Checkers" myfile
The fgrep
command is case sensitive; specifying "dog" will not match "Dog" or "DOG". You can use the -i
option with the grep
command to match both upper- and lowercase letters:
grep -i dog myfile
To list the lines of myfile
that do not contain "dog", use the -v
option:
fgrep -v dog myfile
If you want to search for lines that contain any of several different words, you can create a second file (named secondfile
in the following example) that contains those words, and then use the -f
option:
fgrep -f secondfile myfile
You can also use wildcards to instruct fgrep
to search any files that match a particular pattern. For example, if you wanted to find lines containing "dog" in any of the files in your directory with names beginning with "my", you could enter:
fgrep dog my*
This command would search files with names such as myfile
, my.hw1
, and mystuff
in the current directory. Each line returned will be prefaced with the name of the file where the match was found.
By using pipes and/or redirection, you can use the output from any of these commands with other Unix tools, such as more
, sort
, and cut
. For example, to print the fifth word of every line of myfile
containing "dog", sort the words alphabetically, and then filter the output through the more
command for easy reading, you would enter at the Unix prompt:
fgrep dog myfile | cut -f5 -d" " | sort | more
If you want to save the output in a file in the current directory named newfile
, enter:
fgrep dog myfile | cut -f5 -d" " | sort > newfile
For more information about grep
, egrep
, and fgrep
, enter:
man grep
At Indiana University, for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems support, see Get help for Linux or Unix at IU.
Related documents
This is document afiy in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2019-08-27 08:52:38.