Manual pages › General commands (1)
grep-original(1)
search a file for a pattern
From the original Amiga UNIX 2.1 manual. Some things it mentions may not be in this release.
With the grep package (with the extra set), see grep(1) instead.
NAME
grep - search a file for a pattern
SYNOPSIS
grep [options] limited regular expression [file ...]
DESCRIPTION
grep searches files for a pattern and prints all lines that contain that pattern. grep uses limited regular expressions (expressions that have string values that use a subset of the possible alphanumeric and special characters) like those used with ed(1) to match the patterns. It uses a compact non-deterministic algorithm.
Be careful using the characters $, *, [, ^, |, (, ), and \ in the limited regular expression because they are also meaningful to the shell. It is safest to enclose the entire limited regular expression in single quotes '...'.
If no files are specified, grep assumes standard input. Normally, each line found is copied to standard output. The file name is printed before each line found if there is more than one input file.
Command line options are:
-b Precede each line by the block number on which it was
found. This can be useful in locating block numbers
by context (first block is 0).
-c Print only a count of the lines that contain the pat-
tern.
-i Ignore upper/lower case distinction during comparis-
ons.
-h Prevents the name of the file containing the matching
line from being appended to that line. Used when
searching multiple files.
-l Print the names of files with matching lines once,
separated by new-lines. Does not repeat the names of
files when the pattern is found more than once.
-n Precede each line by its line number in the file
(first line is 1).
-s Suppress error messages about nonexistent or unread-
able files
-v Print all lines except those that contain the pattern.
SEE ALSO
ed(1), egrep(1), fgrep(1), sed(1), sh(1).
DIAGNOSTICS
Exit status is 0 if any matches are found, 1 if none, 2 for syntax errors or inaccessible files (even if matches were found).
NOTES
Lines are limited to BUFSIZ characters; longer lines are truncated. BUFSIZ is defined in /usr/include/stdio.h. If there is a line with embedded nulls, grep will only match up to the first null; if it matches, it will print the entire line.