How To Search/grep
This page may need to be Grep is a Unix utility that searches through either information piped to it or files in the current directory. An example should help clarify things.
Let's say that we wanted to search through a directory, and wanted to find all the files that had the string "hello" in their name. You might issue the 'ls' command in a shell to list the directory's content and:
$ ls
DumpSite.sh crontab.txt nagios-3.0.6 xmpppy xymon-4.3.0-beta2
and look through everything manually, or you could use the 'ls' command and pipe the output of ls to grep:
$ ls |grep crontab crontab.txt
On the contrary, if you want to filter a list unless some entries, put it in the parameter -v:
$ ls |grep -v crontab DumpSite.sh nagios-3.0.6 xmpppy xymon-4.3.0-beta2
the '|' character is the representation of the pipe basically directs the output of the 'ls' command as input for grep. You should get a nice (perhaps empty) list with all the files that have "hello" in their names.
If you know regular expressions, then you're in luck: grep can take regexes instead of just plain strings. A simple example for that might be looking for all .txt OR .jpg files in a directory :
$ ls | grep '.*[txt|jpg]'
The regex here is made up from .* which can stand for anything in a file's name and [txt|jpg] which yields either txt or jpg as file endings.
See also [edit]
- zgrep (the same thing in some compressed files)
