Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Finding Text with grep

You can search through multiple files for specific strings of characters and then view the list of matching files onscreen. You do this using the grep command (which stands for “global regular expression print,” a once useful and now rather arcane ed or vi command), as shown in Code Listing 6.7. As we’ll show you, you can add several flags to grep to get slightly different results.

Code Listing 6.7. Use grep to see all occurrences of a specific string in a file.

[ejr@hobbes manipulate]$ grep bucket → limericks Who carried his lunch in a bucket, [ejr@hobbes manipulate]$

Code Listing 6.8. grep can show the context around instances of the string as well.\

[ejr@hobbes manipulate]$ grep -5 bucket → limerick he strummed and ...