“The grep utility is a handy little tool with which every
Unix programmer should be familiar. Grep easily matches simple
strings, and uses a variety of wild cards and special symbols to
create a regular expression to search for more complex
strings. This month, Mo walks you through grep, egrep, and
fgrep, offers some command option examples, and sheds light on
grep’s most powerful asset, regular expressions.”
“The grep utility, which allows files to be searched for strings
of words, uses a syntax similar to the regular expression syntax of
the vi, ex, ed, and sed editors. grep comes in three flavors, grep,
fgrep, and egrep, all of which I’ll cover in this article.”
“The name grep is derived from the editor command g/re/p, which
literally translates to “globally search for a regular wxpression
and print what you find.” Regular expressions are at the core of
grep, and I’ll cover them after a brief description of some of the
utility’s command options.”