Regardless of what flavor of Unix, Linux or BSD you use, you can generally count on Grep, Sed and Awk’s availability. These command line utilities provide different ways of searching and manipulating text. Understanding how to use these powerful tools will greatly enhance your command line effectiveness and productivity.

This will be a multi-part series, where each post will focus on one of these three tools. This segment will explore “Grep” using a nursery rhyme. To give some concrete examples, when “rhyme.txt” is referenced, assume it has the following content:

Hickory dickory dock

The mouse ran up the clock

The clock struck one

The mouse ran down

Hickory dickory dock

– “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” (public domain)

Example 1: Searching for a Given String

If we wanted to find all occurrences of the word mouse in “rhyme.txt,” we could use this command:

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grep 'mouse' rhyme.txt

which would result in:

The mouse ran up the clock The mouse ran down

Note that if you had multiple files to search (ex: rhyme1.txt, rhyme2.txt and rhyme3.txt), the syntax would be:

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grep 'mouse' rhyme1.txt rhyme2.txt rhyme3.txt

Or using the “glob” (i.e., “wildcard”) syntax:

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grep 'mouse' rhyme\*.txt

Or you could even use:

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cat rhyme\*.txt | grep 'mouse'

(Note: As in the above example, when you don’t provide any file names, Grep will process input from standard input.)

Example 2: Using Regular Expressions

Say we wanted to find lines that rhymed (i.e., ending in “-ock”). We might be tempted to use:

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grep 'ock' rhyme.txt

matching lines containing “dock” and “clock”. However, it would also return the line:

The clock struck one

which is not what we want. Instead, we want to leverage regular expressions:

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grep 'ock\$' rhyme.txt

which would correctly return:

Hickory dickory dock

The mouse ran up the clock

Hickory dickory dock

If we wanted to be even more precise, we could enable grep’s extended regular expression syntax with the “-E” flag and use:

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grep -E '(dock|clock)\$' rhyme.txt

See below for links for further reading about regular expressions in grep.

Example 3: Case Insensitivity

Now, pretend you wanted to find usages of the word “the.” Using the following command:

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grep 'the' rhyme.txt

will only return the line:

The mouse ran up the clock

as by default, grep matches not only the search text but the case as well. To make grep case-insensitive, use the “-i” flag:

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grep -i 'the' rhyme.txt

which will correctly return:

The mouse ran up the clock

The clock struck one

The mouse ran down

Example 4: Inverting Search Results

Having obtained all lines that contain “the,” the “-v” flag will invert the match, returning all lines that do not contain “the.” Thus, we could use the following (remembering, of course, to use the “-i” flag):

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grep -i -v 'the' rhyme.txt

which would return:

Hickory dickory dockHickory dickory dock

Example 5: Context

Lastly, Grep provides the ability to display contextual lines. For example, if we wanted to search for “struck” and display both the previous and next line, we could use:

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grep -C 1 'struck' rhyme.txt

resulting in:

The mouse ran up the clock

The clock struck one

The mouse ran down

Using the “-A” and “-B” options will allow you to independently control the number of preceding and subsequent contextual lines.

There’s More!

Although these are the major options, grep has many more capabilities that we didn’t have time to cover. Check out its man page for a full list.