This will look for literal strings only, it won't use or expand any kind of regular expression.įor example you could type: fgrep 'a$*b?' file.txtĪnd fgrep would look for the string “a$*b?” in the file “file.txt”. This version of grep calls grep with the -F option. You could also use grep with the -r option to achieve the same affect. Sometimes we dont want to search for a single word, but a phrase. Follows similar syntax to grep (see above). Use grep to select lines from text files that match simple patterns. This will search all the files in the current directory and all it's subdirectories and print the names of the files and the matching line. rgrepĪ 'recursive' version of grep (this is a different program to grep).

The first command lists all RPM's installed on your system, the second finds any containing the string “ogg” and outputs them. Or you could use it like this, to search through the output of another file: rpm -qa | grep ogg This command uses regular expressions, for more information please see, the Section called Regular Expressions in Chapter 20.įor example, this command would look in the file “rpmlist.txt” for anything starting with “rpm”: grep rpm rpmlist.txt r or rgrep - search for text within files recursively. A x or -B x (where x is a number) - display “x” lines After or Before the section where the particular word is found. w - this option makes grep match the whole word

n - this option displays the line numbers v - this option is used to display lines which do not contain the string. For example: grep this_word this_file.txt

Search word files for text