Grep

• What is Grep?
• grep is a pattern matching tool
• grep can be used as a search tool
• grep can use Regular Expressions (regex) to help find more complex patterns
• grep can be used with pipe or by itself to search the contents of files
• There are different forms of grep, so it's important to make sure you know which one you're using and why
• What is Grep good at?
• Pattern matching
• Pattern matching using plain text or regex
• Finding things that either match a pattern, or everything that doesn't match a pattern
• What is Grep not so good at?
• Reading minds, grep is very literal and will find exactly what you tell it to even if "that's not really what you meant"
• Anything that isn't pattern matching, so grep is not good at replacements, substitutions, sorting or anything like that
• Some examples of how to use grep as shown in the video
• cat file | grep pattern
• grep file pattern
• grep file option pattern
• grep pattern file | grep secondPattern
• Some Grep Resources
• An older text on how to use grep, formatting has some issues on smaller screens
• The Grymoire on Grep
• Backup on web archive of the grep section of the Grymoire

Suggested Resources and Exercises:

• Download the GrepLab File by right clicking Here and saving your file onto your Linux machine, and then Complete the problem sets that are found on This PDF using the GrepLab file you downloaded from above. Make sure you are paying attention to file location and your paths

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