grep

GREP is a command line search utility or tool  to filter the input given to it. Grep got its name from ed editor as g/re/p (global / regular expression / print).

GREP command syntax

grep options searchterm filename

or

command | grep options searchterm 

For searching a word in file

 grep 'ada' filename

For search a word which is either caps or small letters(i — case insensitive )

 grep -i 'ac' filename

inverse search for a word

 grep -v 'ac' filename

To count a word occurrence

 find -c ‘ac’ filename

Find ac characters along line numbers

 grep -n 'ac' filename

Find exact word ac

 grep -x 'ac' filename

Basic regular expressions:

^ -- Caret symbol, Match beginning of the line.

$ -- Match End of the line

* -- Match 0 or more occurrence of previous character

. – Match Any single character

[] – Match Range of characters, just single occurrence.

            [a-z] –Match small letters

            [A-Z] –Match cap letters

            [0-9] – Match numerical.

[^] – Match Negate a sequence

\ -- Match Escape character.

If we learn any new thing with example, it will be there for long time in our mind. Now we will see one example each regular expression what we given above.

Example1: Find all the lines which start with “Mr”

grep ‘^Mr’ filename

Example2: Find all the lines which ends with ‘sh’

grep ‘sh$’ filename

Example3: Display all the lines in a file expect empty lines.

grep –v ‘^$’ filename

Note:-v option is used to negate the search term, here ^$ indicates empty line, so our grep –v is filtering empty lines in the output.

Example4: Search for words which are bash, baash, bsh, baaash, baaaaash,

grep ‘ba*s’ filename

This will search for words which has a between b and s zero or more times.

Example5: Search for all words which starts with b and h

grep ‘b.*h’ filename

Example6: Search for a word which is having three letters in it and starts with x and ends with m.

grep ‘x[a-z]m’ filename

This search will return all the 3 letter words which start with x and ends with m.

Example7: Search words do not contain ‘ac’ in a file.

grep ‘[^ac]’ filename

Example8: Search for a ‘[‘ in a file

Note: The “[“is a special character, you cannot search with normal grep we have to use escape character (\) in order to negate it. So use ‘\[‘ to search for [. This is applicable for all the special characters mention above.

grep ‘\[’ filename

Please feel free to comment on this, if you have more thoughts. Stay tuned to our next grep post on how to use extended regular expressions.

Extended regular expressions:

+ --Match one or more occurrences of previous character.

| -- Match Either character

? – Match 0 or 1 occurrence of previous character.

() –match a group of characters

{number} –Match number of occurrence of a character

{1, 3} –Match a character which is 1 to 3 times repetition

{5, } –Match a repeated character which is repeated 5 or more times.

Note1: In order to use this extended regular expressions we have to use –E option give grep the capability to understand Extended regular expressions.

Note2: egrep is nothing but grep –E, so try to avoid it if grep itself can do the work for you. Why to learn new command?

Examples:

Example1:Search for a words which contains one or more occurrence of ‘b’ between a and c.

grep –E ‘ab+c’ filename

Example2: Search for a word which contains zero or one occurrence of b between a and c

grep –E ‘ab?c’ filename

Example3: Search for a word which contains either a or b, a and b between d, e characters

grep –E ‘da|be’ filename 

Example4: Search for a word which contains either a or b, but not both a and b between d, e characters

grep –E ‘d(a|b)e’ filename 

Example5: Search for a word which contains only 2 ‘b’ between a and c character

grep –E ‘ab{2}c’ filename

Example6: Search for a word which contains 3 to 4 ‘b’ between a and c character

grep –E ‘ab{2,4}c’ filename

Example7: Search for a word which contains 3 or more ‘b’ between a and c character

grep –E ‘ab{3, }c’ filename 

Note: When we are using {} we have to give a range, but in this example we did not give range we just started the range but did not end the range which indicates infinity.

Please share your thoughts on this.