GREP (Global regular expression print) is a command line search utility, This command us useful to filder specific word or input given to it.
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).
Now we will see how to grep command with all options.
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'
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
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’ filenameExample6: Search for a word which contains 3 to 4 ‘b’ between a and c character
grep –E ‘ab{2,4}c’ filenameExample7: Search for a word which contains 3 or more ‘b’ between a and c character
grep –E ‘ab{3, }c’ filename 
