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