OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day  

Week 101 - Unix Commands Reference (7 March 2005)

by Adrian Mayo - Editor, OSXFAQ

Thursday - Commands to Search for Content

grep ... search a file for text
Search a file for specific text, or a pattern specified by a regular expression (see 'man re_format')
Option -i to specify case-insensitivity
Option -w to match whole words
Option -r to search all files in a directory subtree
Option -v to display lines that do NOT match
Options -n, -l, -L, -h, -H to control the what is printed in terms of matched text, filenames, and line numbers
Option -E to use extended regular expressions instead of basic
Option -F to use fixed strings (this is much quicker than pattern matching)

egrep ... search a file for text
The same as 'grep -E', i.e it used extended regular expressions

fgrep ... search a file for text
The same as 'grep -F'

(See tips weeks 9 and 10)

zgrep, bzgrep ... grep a zipped, bzipped file

bzegrep ... egrep a bzipped file

bzfgrep ... fgrep a bzipped file

perl ... a text manipulation language
From the man pages:
Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

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