What is the usage of grep in linux?

The usage of grep in Linux is to search for lines of text that match a specific pattern and output the matching lines. The grep command has a variety of options and usages, allowing flexible search and matching operations according to different needs. Commonly used options are: 1. -i, ignore the case of characters when searching; 2. -n, display matching line numbers; 3. -c, count the number of matching lines; 4. -r, recursively search in the specified directory Search files under; 5. -l, only display file names containing matching items; 6. -v, reverse matching, output lines that do not contain matching items, etc.

#The operating system of this tutorial: linux6.4.3 system, Dell G3 computer.

The grep command is a commonly used text search tool in Linux/Unix environments. It uses regular expressions to search for lines of text that match specific patterns and outputs the matching lines. The grep command has a variety of options and usages, allowing flexible search and matching operations according to different needs.

Basic usage

The basic usage of the grep command is as follows:

grep [options] pattern [file...]

Among them, options are the options of the grep command, used to specify the search behavior; pattern is the search pattern, which can Use a regular expression to match text; file is the file name and specifies which files to search in.

Common options

The following are some common options for the grep command:

-i: Ignore case, ignore the case of characters when searching.

-n: Display matching line numbers.

-c: Count the number of matching lines.

-r: Recursively search for files in the specified directory.

-l: Show only file names that contain matches.

-v: Reverse matching, output lines that do not contain matching items.

-A num: Output the content after the matching item, num indicates the number of lines to be output.

-B num: Output the content before the matching item, num indicates the number of lines to be output.

-C num: Output the content before and after the match, num indicates the number of lines to be output.

Example usage

The following are some example usages of the grep command:

Search for lines containing the "grep" keyword in all files in the current directory:

grep grep *

Search for lines containing a specific string in the file and output the line number:

grep -n 'string' file.txt

Recursively search for keywords in the file in the directory:

grep -r 'pattern' /path/to/directory

Reverse match, output Lines that do not contain the keyword:

grep -v 'pattern' file.txt

Search for lines that contain the keyword but do not contain the keyword in a specific file:

grep 'pattern' file1.txt | grep -v -f file2.txt

Here is a more complex example, we will be in a directory Search for lines containing the "def" keyword in all Python files in its subdirectories, and output the line number and line content:

grep -n 'def' /path/to/directory/*.py

We can also use recursive search, for example, in the current directory and its subdirectories Search all files in the directory for lines containing the "import" keyword:

grep -r 'import' ./*

In addition, we can also use grep in conjunction with other commands, such as using pipes to pass the output to other commands for processing. Here is an example that uses grep to search a file for lines containing the "error" keyword, and passes the results to the less command for paged viewing:

grep 'error' file.txt | less

These examples are just a small sampling of what the grep command can do, The grep command also supports more complex regular expressions and more options. You can view more detailed grep command documentation by running the man grep command for more information and usage.

The above is the detailed content of What is the usage of grep in linux?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!