grep Command: Tutorial & Examples
Search for a pattern of text within a file
The grep command is a utility that is used to search for specific patterns of text within one or more files. It is a powerful tool that is often used in combination with other
commands, such as cat, less, and tail, to filter and process the output of those commands.
To search for a specific pattern of text within a file, you can use grep followed by the search pattern and the name of the file:
grep "search_pattern" file.txt
This will search the file for lines that contain the search pattern and display any matches.
You can use the -i flag to ignore case when searching:
grep -i "search_pattern" file.txt
You can use the -r flag to search recursively through a directory and its subdirectories:
grep -r "search_pattern" directory
You can use the -v flag to invert the match and display lines that do not contain the search pattern:
grep -v "search_pattern" file.txt
grep is a very useful and versatile tool for searching and filtering text on a Linux system. It is often used in scripts and other automation tasks to extract specific information
from text files or command output.
Further Reading
- Bash Cookbook by Carl Albing, J.P. Vossen (partner link)
- Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor, Brandon Perry (partner link)
- Black Hat Bash by Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi (partner link)
- Bash Pocket Reference by Arnold Robbins (partner link)
- The Linux Command Line by William Shotts (partner link)
- Learning the Bash Shell by Cameron Newham (partner link)
- Mastering Linux Shell Scripting by Mokhtar Ebrahim, Andrew Mallett (partner link)
- Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible by Richard Blum, Christine Bresnahan (partner link)
- Shell Scripting by Jason Cannon (partner link)
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