Searching and mining text inside a file with grep
If you forget where you left your keys, you've just got to search for them. If you forget what file has some information, the grep command will find it for you. This recipe will teach you how to locate files that contain patterns.
How to do it...
The grep command is the magic Unix utility for searching text. It accepts regular expressions and can produce reports in various formats.
- Search
stdinfor lines that match a pattern:
$ echo -e "this is a word\nnext line" | grep word this is a word
- Search a single file for lines that contain a given pattern:
$ grep pattern filename this is the line containing pattern
Alternatively, this performs the same search:
$ grep "pattern" filename this is the line containing pattern
- Search multiple files for lines that match a pattern:
$ grep "match_text" file1 file2 file3 ... - To highlight the matching pattern, use the
-coloroption. While the option position does not matter, the convention is...
