Linux Newbie : Why grep almost never yields something productive

"Every Linux newbie hears about power of grep sooner or later. But no sooner does newbie try to the grep command the experiment ends badly. The reason grep almost never yields anything productive is because of a couple of issues. The basic problem is lack of knowledge of regular expressions and secondly knowledge of switches of grep. This realization should not deter a new user from using grep. A very nice detailed tutorial of regular expression (regex) is available here. The migrating user having used dir and similar commands in DOS and using windows search box almost never expects (nor can fathom) the power provided by grep.

"Firstly grep means "global regular expression print". Now this means that knowledge of regex is required to be able to use grep effectively. Now what should a newbie do? Wait till user's regex knowledge improves? NO NOT AT ALL. That would scare away the user and never to use grep. Here is the first simple command that would work to display the files in the current directory."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Bash 101: Working at the CLI(Jan 10, 2010)
• Grep and print control characters in file(Dec 04, 2009)
• sed and grep tips(Jul 16, 2009)
• Command line made easy: five simple recipes for grep(May 06, 2009)
• Colorize grep output(Mar 16, 2009)
• Using Grep To Streamline Your Shell And Command Line Scripting(Aug 08, 2008)
• grep Is A Beautiful Tool(Jul 15, 2008)
• Using grep and sed to Find and Replace(Nov 29, 2007)