Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Name

grep

Synopsis

    grep [options] regexp [files]

Search one or more files for lines that match a regular expression regexp. Regular expressions are described in Chapter 7. Exit status is 0 if any lines match, 1 if not, and 2 for errors. See also egrep and fgrep.

Options

The options for grep are the same as for egrep, including the Solaris versus GNU differences. For Solaris, there is an exception: /usr/xpg4/bin/grep also accepts the -q option. See egrep for the full list.

Examples

List the number of users who use the C shell:

    grep -c /bin/csh /etc/passwd

List header files that have at least one #include directive:

    grep -l '^#include' /usr/include/*

List files that don’t contain pattern :

    grep -c pattern files | grep :0