When a program performs operations on input and writes the
result to the standard output, it is called a filter. One of the
most common uses of filters is to restructure output. We'll discuss
a couple of the most important filters below.
5.3.1. More about grep
As we saw in
Section 3.3.3.4, grep scans the output line per
line, searching for matching patterns. All lines containing the
pattern will be printed to standard output. This behavior can be
reversed using the -v option.
Some examples: suppose we want to know which files in a certain
directory have been modified in February:
jenny:~> ls -la | grep Feb
|
The grep command, like most commands, is
case sensitive. Use the -i option to make
no difference between upper and lower case. A lot of GNU extensions
are available as well, such as --colour,
which is helpful to highlight searchterms in long lines, and
--after-context, which prints the number of
lines after the last matching line. You can issue a recursive
grep that searches all subdirectories of
encountered directories using the -r
option. As usual, options can be combined.
Regular expressions can be used to further detail the exact
character matches you want to select out of all the input lines.
The best way to start with regular expressions is indeed to read
the grep documentation. An excellent chapter
is included in the grep Info page. Since it would lead us too far
discussing the ins and outs of regular expressions, it is strongly
advised to start here if you want to know more about them.
Play around a bit with grep, it will be
worth the trouble putting some time in this most basic but very
powerful filtering command. The exercises at the end of this
chapter will help you to get started, see
Section 5.5.
