egrep—searches a file for a pattern using full regular expressions

egrep [ –bchilnsv ] [ –e special–expression ][ –f filename ][ strings ] [ filename ... ]

egrep (expression grep) searches files for a pattern of characters and prints all lines that contain that pattern. egrep uses full regular expressions (expressions with string values that use the full set of alphanumeric and special characters) to match the patterns.

Example A.18. 
1   egrep 'Tom|John' datafile
2   egrep '^ [A-Z]+' file

EXPLANATION

  1. Display all lines in datafile containing the pattern either Tom or John.

  2. Display al lines starting with one or more uppercase letters.

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