To see all of the options you can use with grep type: man grep in your terminal.

You can also use pipes to pipe the output of a command through grep to filter out information. There are a lot of other flags you can use with grep. In this tutorial you explored a few of the ways to use grep to search through files and directories for a pattern. In the example it looks for all files with the. Note: The * in Linux stands for 'zero or more characters'. Note: This command will search through all files in the current working directory. txt to see which files contain the word meow. For this example you will search through the file type. It will search only the names of files containing selected lines. The -l flag is shorthand for-files-with-matches`. However, if you were unsure which files contained the word you could search for a specific file type with the -l flag. When we searched through the previous files we knew that they contained the word meow. You can now try to do the same inverted search in the story.txt file and see what the results would be. In your terminal navigate to your book directory with the cd command then type:Įnter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode In this section you will use the grep command to search for the word cat in the story.txt file. One way to use the grep command is to search for a word in a specific file. If you would like to practice the Linux commands to create a directory, files, and add text please see Part 1 and 2 of my Hands-on Commands tutorial. We will use these files throughout the tutorial. Create a directory on your computer called book and add 2 text files named story.txt and poem.txt.If you do not have a Linux distro set up, you can use an online command shell to practice these commands.įor this tutorial I used the terminal found on MacOS. You can use a Linux shell or any Unix terminal like the one found on MacOS.In this tutorial you will use the grep command to search within files and directories and print file types that contain a certain string and more. There are many ways to use the grep command.

It would print all the lines matching a certain pattern. It was a command used in a simple Unix text editor called ed(pronounced ee dee). Grep is a commonly used command in Linux (or Unix) to search through 1 or more files for a pattern or word.įun fact: grep is short for Global regular expression print(g/re/p).

Grep find file