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grep
Chapter 10 grep (global regular expression print)
• grep is a family of utilities that is used to search
an input file for all lines that match a specified regular expression and write them to standard output. • To write scripts that operate correctly, it is important that you understand how the grep utilities work. • In this set of slides, RE or regexp will stand for regular expression.
2 Overview of grep
3 grep Operation Repeat on each line of input until the end of input: • Copy the next input line into a buffer called the pattern space. • Apply the regular expression to the pattern space. • If there is a match, copy the line from the pattern space to the standard output.
4 grep Flowchart
5 grep Example
Continued 6 Example (cont)
7 Analyzing grep Note the following about grep: grep is a search facility. It searches only for the existence of a line that contains a match on the supplied regular expression. grep only can send a line to standard output if a match occurs or ignore it if it doesn’t find a match. Only the regular expression match can be used to select lines. grep is a filter that can be used on the left or the right of a pipe.
8 grep Limitations
Although these limitations on grep can be
overcome by using other utilities, grep CANNOT Be used to add, delete, or change a line in the input file. Be used to print only part of a line. Read only part of a file. Select a line based on the contents of a previous or later line. The buffer holds only the current line.
9 The grep Family
There are three utilities in the grep family
10 fgrep (fast grep) Uses ONLY sequence operators in a pattern and strings with no special characters such as wildcards, character classes, anchored characters, or groupings. However, as its name suggests, this utility is the fastest to execute as the matching algorithms are optimized for this restricted set of REs. Example: $ fgrep “seven” file1 Fgrep won’t handle complex patterns such as $ fgrep “seven | one” file1 It is best on all of the grep commands to enclose the RE in either double or single quotes to avoid problems. grep –F is the same as fgrep. 11 grep – The Original
Handles most of the RE.
This one is generally slower than egrep which is the most powerful. So why use grep ever? It is the only algorithm in the family that
allows the saving of results of a match for
later use.
12 grep Family Options -c prints only a count of the number of lines matching the pattern. -i ignores upper/lowercase in matching text -l prints a list of files that contain at least one line matching the pattern. -n show number of each line before the line. -s silent mode -v inverse output. Prints lines that do not match pattern -x prints only lines that entirely match pattern -f list of strings to be matched are in file 13 egrep – (extended grep) The Most Powerful
It allows more complex patterns than grep,
although it doesn’t have the save option. grep –E is the same as egrep. Unfortunately, there are various versions of the grep family commands and the differences between them can be quite confusing (see the man grep results). Many people tend to use egrep and see if they need the save option. fgrep should be used if the RE is super simple as it is significantly faster than the others. 14 Examples – testfile is a text file 1. Select the lines that have exactly three characters egrep ‘^…$’ testfile The ... matches 3 characters between the start of the line, ^, and the end of the line, $.
2. Select the lines from the file that have at least
three characters egrep ‘…’ testfile The ... matches any 3 characters in the line.
15 Examples (cont) 3. Select the lines from the file that have three or fewer characters and show their line numbers. egrep –vn ‘….’ testfile -n shows line number; -v takes opposite of having 4 characters – i.e. 3 or fewer. 4. Count the number of blank lines in the file egrep –c ‘^$’ testfile 5. Count the number of nonblank lines in the file egrep –c ‘.’ testfile 6. Select the lines from the file that have the string UNIX fgrep ‘UNIX’ testfile
16 Examples (cont) 7. Select the lines from the file that have only the string UNIX egrep ‘^UNIX$’ testfile 8. Select the lines from the file that have the pattern UNIX at least two times egrep ‘UNIX.*UNIX’ 9. Copy the file to the monitor, but delete the blank lines. egrep –v ‘^$’ testfile -v takes the opposite of the pattern, i.e. match any line that is NOT blank.
17 Examples (cont) 10. Select the lines from the file that have at least two digits without any character in between egrep ‘[0-9][0-9]’ testfile 11. Select the lines from the file whose first nonblank character is A egrep ‘^ *A’ testfile 12. Select the lines from the file that do not start with A to G and show line number egrep –n ‘^[^A-G]’ testfile 13. Find out if John is currently logged into the system who | grep ‘John’
18 Examples (cont)
14. Search for the string ‘include’ in all the files in
the working directory that end with .c (i.e. C source code files.) and displays with line number. egrep –n include *.c 15. Search for the string “one night” and display matched lines and 3 lines above each one and 3 below - i.e. display the line in context. (Linux only command) egrep -3 “one night” testfile
19 Searching File for Content
When we know the directory that contains the file, we
can use grep by itself. The option –l prints out the filename of any file that has at least one line matching the grep expression. grep –l ‘UNIX’ * When we do not know where the file is located, we use find command with the execute criterion. find ~ -type f –exec grep –l “UNIX” {} \; The {} \; are needed by the –exec command which asks that grep be executed with the option –l and the argument “UNIX”
