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grep filter

Search content of text files for matching patterns. It is definitely worth learning at least the basics of this command.

A simple example. The command:

cat * | grep my_word | more

will search all the files in the current working directory (except files starting with a dot) and print the lines which contain the string "my_word".

A shorter form to achieve the same may be:

grep my_word * |more

The patterns are specified using a powerful and standard notation called "regular expressions".

There is also a "recursive" version of grep called rgrep. This will search all the files in the current directory and all its subdirectories for my_word and print the names of the files and the matching line:

rgrep -r my_word . | more

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